The society lives in a dynamic, complex and contradictory urban system, seeking to reach a balance between urban development and environmental preservation. For this purpose, there is a need to perform an efficient urban management integrated with the information and communication technologies. From this integration, emerges the smart cities concept, which is composed of smart governance strategies and actions. In this sense, the present article aims to understand and discuss the contributions, potentials and public values of the multipurpose territorial cadastre and the collaborative participation as tools for smart governance. In order to validate the theoretical essay, a case study was performed to analyze urban governance in the São Paulo metropolitan region, Brazil, according to the use of information and geoinformation resources applied to cities’ management, pre- and post-pandemics. The results have shown that some practices of municipal governments have already been established aligned with the dimensions of smart governance. However, mainly, as for spatial activation in the use of geoinformation, as well as in the use of multipurpose territorial cadastre, it still has much to move forward and, therefore, to qualify with public value the strategies and actions of governance that a smart city requires.