Despite extensive investment in smart city infrastructure, adoption remains uneven across urban populations. While existing research has examined individual demographic factors influencing smart city adoption, the role of neighborhood-level context as a distinct determinant remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating how neighborhood residency, beyond individual demographics, shapes engagement with municipal digital technologies. Using data from a representative telephone survey (n = 489) across four socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods in Tel Aviv, we tested whether neighborhood context provides explanatory power beyond demographic variables alone. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we found that including neighborhoods in the adoption model improves model fit by nearly 20 percentage points relative to a model including only demographic factors. Neighborhood residency is associated with the use of digital services, technological proficiency (TP), and privacy concerns (PC), which, in turn, mediate attitudes toward smart city adoption. These attitudes were then correlated with administrative data on the use of municipal smart city services. An additional analysis revealed that, although user-facing digital services exhibit similar socioeconomic gradients, municipality-led infrastructure (e.g., bike-sharing) shows a more equitable distribution, suggesting distinct equity dynamics across smart city service types. We conclude the paper by suggesting that neighborhoods can be treated as the central unit for studying, designing, and deploying smart city technologies.
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