Abstract
This paper aims to presents the overview of research in the sustainable smart cities development domain. It investigates the key challenges of the sustainable smart cities development that faced by the developers from different countries. The qualitative research method via the interview is conducted to collect the data. 10 experts on the sustainable smart cities development project were interviewed in this study. The results indicate that there are 12 sustainable smart cities development challenges named: (1) budgetary constraint; (2) lack of resources; (3) lack of institutional capacity to deliver technology; (4) lack of systems integration; (5) social acceptability; (6) lack of awareness level in the smart city development among residents; (7) the need to drive towards content development; (8) lack of strategically approach in the smart city transformation; (9) disagreement on standardizing the smart city model; (10) lack of overarching institution to create the governance structure; (11) lack of sustainable focused strategies; and (12) lack of the smart city operational framework. Furthermore, the solutions framework for these challenges was proposed as the guidelines to overcome or minimize them.