Recent work in VANETs within smart cities is increasingly focused on integrating vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and urban IoT sensors to create highly responsive mobility and safety systems. Researchers are exploring how vehicles can act as mobile data hubs, sharing real-time traffic, pollution and infrastructure status with the city network, and how machine-learning and optimization algorithms can dynamically position roadside units and vehicles to maximize data coverage and minimize delays. Security frameworks that protect vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to?vehicle data exchanges are also being developed to support the dense, heterogeneous networks found in urban settings, including federated learning and edge-based anomaly detection. In addition, environmental monitoring applications—such as air-quality sensing and smart parking—are being layered onto VANET platforms, linking the physical mobility of vehicles to smart-city services. These architectural advances aim to support the layered connectivity, real-time response, and scalability needed for the next-generation intelligent transport systems and smart city mobility ecosystems.