**6. Conclusions**

First, Malaysia's experience in smart city development dates back to 1996 Multimedia Super Corridor Malaysia initiative and the later efforts in developing research universities and integrating them with the city they are located [135,136]—through knowledge-based urban development principles to make space and place for smart urban communities [137]. Today, with its new smart city framework, Malaysia aims to transform its cities and societies into smarter ones. This paper aims to generate insights into how this framework is perceived with professional practitioners. In order to do so, this study conducted an empirical investigation concerning the seven smart city domains planned as part of a top-down national policy of the Malaysian Smart City Framework (MSCF). The findings disclosed that smart environment and digital infrastructure require the most attention, followed by smart mobility, governance, living, economy, and people.

Second, this study has contributed to the smart city discourse and literature particularly by examining the levels of understanding and acceptance from the multi-perspectives of practitioners from various sectors. The study is unique as it is one of the first in capturing professional practitioners' voices and perspectives on a national level smart city policy that impacts a large portion of the population. This finding is an important insight added to the literature investigating, in detail, smart city domains in practice. The divergent and dissensus opinions from the ground are valuable references for leaders and policymakers to consider in building a more inclusive and smarter city blueprint. Furthermore, applying the Fuzzy Delphi method in smart city studies is rather new. It has great potential to be explored and expanded into urban studies and planning disciplines as this method is popular in education, business, and management studies [138].

Last, the limitations of this study are the selection of purposive sampling for the Fuzzy Delphi analysis and the formulation of questionnaire items from the broader scopes of the smart city domains. Thus, based on the smart city domains and after designing two objectives of understanding and acceptance, future studies could explore other qualitative or quantitative methods to justify the results in this study. Other studies that evaluate the implementation of the smart city domain objectives could be conducted, such as using structural equation modelling to assess the implementation of smart city strategies in Greece [139] and acceptance of smart meters in Malaysia [37]. Moreover, future studies could be expanded to capture the voices and perspectives of the general public on national and local smart city strategy and initiatives. This will be the focus of our prospective study.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization and methodology, writing—original draft preparation, software, formal analysis, investigation, and data curation, S.B.L.; supervision, validation, resources, funding acquisition, project administration, review and editing, J.A.M., M.F.Y.M.Y. and T.Y. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** The study received funding support from the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education (grant number FRGS/1/2019/SS06/UKM/02/2). The funder was not involved in the planning, execution, write-up, or other contents of this article.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all participants involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data are contained within the article and appendixes.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors wish to thank study participants, managing editor and three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and constructive critiques.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest and have no financial or proprietary interests in any material presented/discussed in this article.
