Over the past decade, two dominant perspectives prevail on the governance of smart cities. From a public administration perspective, ‘smart governance’ emphasizes the importance of technology-based tools in transforming government institutions. From an urban planning perspective, the governance of smart cities focuses on the institution interaction with spatial challenges. Within this backdrop, these perspectives can learn from each other to arrive at new transformative smart governance approaches. This paper proposes a specific urban planning perspective on smart governance, labeled as ‘smart urban governance’. It is aiming specifically at the transformative governance of the socio-spatial context of urban challenges associated to smart cities via technological innovations and opening up new possibilities for city transformation. To this end, the meaning of smart urban governance is conceptualized from three dimensions: purposes, components and contexts. Based on a systematic literature review, these three dimensions are integrated into one holistic framework. A case illustration was applied to demonstrate the use and advantages of this framework. From this, this paper concludes that smart urban governance, by explicitly taking into account the specific socio-spatial context, can improve our understanding of the urban challenges associated to smart cities and contribute to its appropriate and ‘smart’ governance.