Smart cities provide technological solutions designed to address urban challenges and improve the quality of life. To formulate effective smart city solutions, it is crucial to align proposed solutions with the needs of the city’s stakeholders, including citizens. A software engineering discipline that focuses on a systematic approach to gathering, analyzing, specifying, and validating requirements is known as requirements engineering. While there is extensive research on requirements engineering and smart cities individually, there is limited study discussing requirements engineering for smart cities (RE4SC). To address this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review and investigated 27 papers related to RE4SC. We categorized the articles into four categories, based on the requirements engineering phases: requirements elicitation, requirements analysis, requirements specification, and requirements validation. Our analysis reveals that research on RE4SC is predominantly conducted by researchers from the Global North countries, with a significant focus on the requirements elicitation phase.