This review paper examines how a real-time smart-city command center can be designed for Riyadh and Jeddah by integrating multi-source IoT sensing, lakehouse analytics, and executive dashboards within a Saudi governance environment. The paper synthesizes literature published between 2020 and 2026 and expands the earlier draft by adding a PRISMA-style review procedure, a dashboard tiering model, a sensor-fusion workflow, sample KPI structures, Saudi institutional enablers, and scenario-based operating use cases. The review finds that the value of a command center does not come from visualization alone. It depends on the reliability of telemetry, the speed and quality of cross-domain data integration, the discipline of lineage and privacy controls, and the ability of dashboards to convert technical signals into action for operators, managers, and executives. The paper proposes a five-layer command-center framework for Riyadh and Jeddah that aligns sensing, streaming integration, lakehouse curation, analytical services, and executive decision support. It argues that the Saudi model must be explicitly shaped by the Saudi Data & AI Authority’s National Data Bank role, NDMO data sharing and interoperability standards, PDPL obligations, national geospatial/location platforms, and Vision 2030 Quality of Life outcomes. The paper concludes that Riyadh and Jeddah can benefit significantly from integrated command centers when analytics are engineered as trustworthy public infrastructure. Under that condition, cities can plausibly reduce incident detection time, improve cross-agency coordination, strengthen service-level compliance, and support more resilient urban operations.