The “smart city” concept, based on information and communication technology (ICT), is widely used to describe a new trend in developing sustainable cities that can cope with complicated problems including traffic jams, high energy consumption, environmental pollution, and waste treatment issues. A smart city is typically considered as a complex system that includes several constituent systems with network-centric connections and multiple interacting components. These constituent systems are highly heterogeneous and have their own function, based on different technology platforms associated with big data, which creates significant challenges in developing a ‘smart’ governance mechanism for the local government. Thus, there is an urgent need for a new approach to ‘smart city’ development in which the ‘smart city’ concept is viewed as a System of Systems (SoS). Taking this perspective, this paper presents a literature review on the topic of the history of smart city governance and its linkage with (SoS) through analysis of 41 peer-reviewed publications during the period 2010 to 2020. The purpose of this literature search was to emerge how a SoS approach can be applied to establish a smart governance mechanism for smart cities. Initial results indicate that the main characteristics of a SoS; autonomy, belonging, connectivity, diversity, and emergence should be considered to clarify the advantages and challenges in establishing SoS governance of smart cities in practice.