According to the United Nations, 68% of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2050. To keep up with that growth — and the demands it places on infrastructure, services and the environment — we have to get smarter about how we plan and build. Around the world, cities are turning to technology and data to improve their livability, sustainability and productivity. But what does that look like in reality? And does more technology inevitably mean more surveillance?

Those questions sit at the heart of this conversation with Dr Courtney Babb, a senior lecturer in urban and regional planning at Curtin University, recorded for the university's podcast The Future Of (Episode 144). Over half an hour, Babb takes us from a purpose-built smart city in South Korea to a stormwater basin turned "smart park" in suburban Perth — and argues that the most interesting things happen in the messiness of real cities.

There's a simple answer to that, but it's a lot more complicated. The simple answer: smart cities are about information — or, more accurately, about data. It's about using the data that comes from a city: how people use it, the different systems within it. And it's about capturing that data for particular purposes — making a better, more livable city, helping our transport systems operate more efficiently.

IBM came up with a description of smart cities that I think is quite useful for a basic understanding: they are instrumented, integrated and intelligent. Instrumented means there are lots of sensors out in the built environment — ways that we capture data. Integrated means that data is collected in a repository and combined with lots of different types of data. And intelligent means we apply analytics techniques to it — so we can use that data to better manage cities, and better plan them for future growth.

It's a term that's been around for a while, but the idea is actually a lot older than the term itself. There was a lot of activity from the 1990s onwards, when smart cities were seen as a way to enhance green growth. Singapore sort of kicked things off globally; South Korea came a little later, but it's a really great example of a very mature and well-funded smart cities program.

A place I took a bunch of students to in 2023 and 2024 was Songdo, within the Seoul metropolitan area. It was a purpose-built city — sometimes described as a tabula rasa, or blank slate. That's not technically correct, because they destroyed a lot of tidal flats and very sensitive wetlands to build it. But it's a purpose-built smart city: all the infrastructure is integrated — water recycling, a range of sensors, cameras everywhere — and it's all collected in a data centre, a command centre. When we took our students there, we could see fifty screens fed by cameras around the city, with people monitoring it all in real time. If there's a flood or an emergency, they can respond and direct services to exactly where they're needed.

One of the hosts jumps in here: between 2008 and 2010, during the back end of the precinct's construction, they were actually in Songdo — and it was astounding, a ground-up approach to creating exactly what Babb describes. Even the arrival through Incheon airport: "probably the most futuristic and stunning airport you'll ever see."

It does have a mixed reception. People note when they first go there that there aren't a lot of people around — very wide streets, great infrastructure. Forty per cent of Songdo is open space and parks, so very generous outdoor living. But it has a reputation for being a bit of a ghost town. I think that's changing. As part of the study tour, we went and talked to residents about what it was like to live there — and it is changing. The people who live there appreciate the particular services available. But it also tends to be for more wealthy residents, the ones who can afford to live there.

Songdo has a good reputation for being what we call a utopian smart city — the idea of the city as a whole being infused with technology that helps it function. There are other examples in the Middle East and Africa. But what I've focused on in my research — following the work of a number of scholars in this area — is what we call the actually existing smart city. The idea is that we should move away from thinking about smart cities as this total utopian vision, and look more at the subtle ways digital technologies are being integrated into cities.

The scholarship on actually existing smart cities looks at projects — at the smaller-scale instances where smart or digital technology has been integrated — and takes that as a starting point. That's useful because it points to the different varieties of smart city: cities as surveilled spaces through cameras, automated cities, artificial intelligence. We can look at how these are emerging in smaller projects and local governments. And that's particularly important for Australia, where that's the main type of smart city investment being rolled out.

It's a lot more fragmented — the projects are smaller, piecemeal, built at different stages, and they might be part of an overall vision. Urban development proceeds a lot more incrementally, and it's shaped by many more stakeholders having a say in the decision-making: developers, community members, as well as planners, engineers and architects who are more directly involved in producing the built environment. As planners, we try to accommodate and listen to all those voices and make that part of the way we develop, rather than a top-down vision imposed upon people. I like the word messiness — it's something I think we need to embrace as planners. Plans don't often go according to how we originally saw them. Plans take time, and cities take time to evolve. We need to respond to that.

This project was funded through the Smart Cities and Suburbs Scheme, part of the federal government's Smart Cities Plan. Previously, the Wharf Street Basin was a fenced-off stormwater basin in the City of Canning. The Canning city centre is undergoing a transformation into an activity centre near the train station — higher density in the area, because it's a flat area near the river, stormwater drainage is a big issue, and there are a number of stormwater drains around. You might know these places: usually fenced off, a drain on a suburban block, sometimes a linear drain — protecting households and surrounding areas from flooding.

The Wharf Street Basin was a fenced-off drain no one used, right in the centre of Canning. Through the scheme, the City of Canning — with the Water Corporation and a number of other stakeholders, including us as researchers at Curtin — received funding to transform it into what was called a smart park. I'm not sure many people knew what a smart park was at the time, or what it could be. It was really about using technology to leverage the functions of an urban park: space for walking for people living in the apartments, integration with the natural environment, and — because it was a stormwater drain — an education component about the role of drains in cities. It became a multifunctional park: there to secure the long-term viability of the area through high-quality public space.

Technology formed a really important part of that. There were smart bins that told you when they needed emptying; public Wi-Fi; environmental sensors monitoring water quality, feeding an open data platform that researchers could use to see in real time how water quality was being affected and how the area was functioning ecologically; CCTV cameras; and augmented reality stations — people could open an app, put their camera through a viewfinder, and it would show them the animals and the ecology of the park. So technology served a number of functions: safety, livability, environmental knowledge, research, and community understanding of stormwater infrastructure.

And the basin still had to function as a stormwater basin — fully operating. That was one of the challenges: it required some clever design and sometimes difficult conversations about the trade-offs between the different functions needed to make the space work. We followed the project through its implementation, and then observed the park over a year to see how people used it. It's a very successful park.

But one of the most interesting things about it is that technology wasn't the main factor in its success. There were definitely some great elements of the technology that worked, but it was delivered on a very tight timeframe, and we didn't really have the organizational knowledge for a lot of the tech side. A lot of it was learning — and building that capacity was part of the point of the Smart Cities Plan.

Cameras are a big part of smart cities. When we went to Seoul in South Korea, one of the things we really noticed was that there were cameras everywhere — but also a lot of disclosure about where the cameras were and what they were being used for. Surveillance happens in different ways too, obviously through phones: we're all geolocated now, so we can be surveilled in terms of where we are. And it's not only government — corporations surveil us through smart technologies as well. There's a real desire to link data sets, and through that, data becomes very powerful: it can tell us more about people's behaviour, their attitudes, their preferences. But there are obviously privacy and ethical issues around that.

In South Korea, we asked many people about the cameras and what they thought. Many of them hadn't even considered them — it was something in the background. South Korea has reasonable data protection laws at the national level, so those things are important too. But we need to think about what are called dual-use technologies: they can have benefits, but there can also be harmful aspects.

One of the problems is not so much the technology itself. If a local government introduces a system of technology — say a surveillance system — it might be implemented in an ethical way. But the architecture and the infrastructure are there. It can be a very simple change later on, and that technology might be used for a different purpose.

That's a really good question — and I think it's one we can ask whenever we're involved in a project like this, even as citizens, if there's a project that concerns us. These are the questions we need to ask: Is it being stored securely? Are there safeguards and protocols in place that respect our privacy? Are we fully made aware of the way that data will be used? Best practice around the ethical use of data is not always evident in the messy world of urban development.

Babb also co-authored a report published by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) on how data can be better used to protect homes from disasters such as floods, bushfires and cyclones.

This research was really about how planners — and everyone else involved in planning and delivering housing — use data, because the impacts of climate change are creating a lot more uncertainty about the magnitude and occurrence of fires, floods and cyclones. We wanted to get a sense of the state of the art in how data was being used in this space. And what we did find is that the data landscape in Australia is very poor. There can be good-quality data out there, but it's pretty fragmented. With hazards, they often don't respect administrative boundaries — data can be good in one location or one organization, and not so good in others. It's a very patchwork situation. Planners often didn't know how to assess whether data was good quality: they could see a data set, but they didn't know the assumptions built into it. And organizations were very siloed — they weren't interested in sharing data. To really leverage this data, we need to think outside local administrative boundaries and think more systemically.

One of the solutions proposed is what we call digital twins, and there's great hope in this technology to help us understand climate risk — not only understand it, because there's a lot of uncertainty, but create scenarios to explore what could happen and incorporate that thinking into our planning, rather than looking at historical records, which is usually how data about risk and hazards has been used. A digital twin creates a digital version of, say, a building, a precinct we're interested in, or a river catchment to understand flooding. It creates data in real time, responsively, so we can start to model systems rather than looking at these issues in isolation — and in this way understand some of the impacts in the context of uncertainty. (For listeners who want more, the hosts point to an earlier episode of The Future Of devoted entirely to digital twins.)

It is. Insurance is one of the factors driving the need for research — it's driven by findings that large areas will be uninsurable in the future due to the risks of hazards.

One of the things we did find in the research is that some of the best-quality data is held by insurance agencies. That creates the imperative for sharing — but often that data is locked away, private, confidential. There are concerted efforts in the insurance industry and also in government to find ways to share this data better, so we can be acting on the best-quality data that is available.

In urban planning we talk about complexity — there are wicked problems with no simple solutions, where doing one thing creates a whole set of other issues. But I'll have a go. One of my areas of research is urban mobility, particularly sustainable transport: trying to get people out of cars and into walking, cycling, scootering. There are a number of reasons we need to do this — decarbonization, a whole range of issues — but particularly liveability. Cities are better places to live if we don't need to rely on the car, and if the car has less impact on our public spaces. The built environment, for all our talk of digital urbanism, is a very analog thing — it's material — and the best solutions are not necessarily technological solutions.

So in terms of what I would do, I'm going to step away from the technology. We need slower speeds to support people walking, wheeling and riding; adequate, separated infrastructure for alternative modes on busier roads; and good policy that actually helps people make better choices about their mobility — better choices for themselves, and better public choices.

Technology is really important in assisting this, particularly around sustainable travel. There are some amazing functionalities — apps that link us up with transport services so we can get around the city more easily and conveniently. And for planners and governments, there's a lot of technology that allows them to manage and monitor transport systems in real time. All these things can be great. But ultimately, I think we need to go back to the fundamentals: is technology necessary for this? Is there a solution that we don't need to invest so much in, in terms of the expense and the expertise?

I would say the statistics have not changed that much — and I don't think it's a big deal. "Smart cities" is sometimes a bit of a confusing term, and a bit of a distraction. It's better to think more about the digital technology itself, and how it's being implemented in different places. So I don't think it's a big issue if people don't understand smart cities. But the best way for people to get involved is to ask questions about technology. "Smart cities" is a great term in that it draws attention to these types of technologies — but sometimes they're being rolled out outside of the smart cities label.

There are some good groups advocating for digital rights that are worth getting involved with — Digital Rights Watch and the Centre for Responsible Technology. They advocate for the ethical use of technologies more broadly, and they do touch upon smart cities — Digital Rights Watch had a campaign recently about banning facial recognition technology in some private spaces. For people wanting to be involved: ask those questions. There's a series of questions that work in most settings when thinking about urban development — who's benefiting from this, who's losing out, and what trade-offs are being made across the public and private interests here.

We are living in very interesting times. I have a report coming out shortly, again on urban mobility, looking at last-mile delivery. Since COVID, the rate of home delivery has increased — exploded, really — and it's forecast to increase even more over the next decade and probably beyond. That's created an issue in terms of getting parcels, those smaller parcels, to people in busy centres. What we've been looking at is the role of what we've called micromobility in this — small electric devices or modes of transport delivering that last mile, from the delivery centre to the door.

So we looked at cargo bikes; we looked at drones and robots — delivery robots, which look like a little esky driving along the footpath. (The hosts have seen them in America and Sydney: "Very cute — little lights on them." "And sometimes cars run them over." "It does happen.") One of the key findings, particularly with the robots, is that we need to understand the trade-offs in terms of the space these modes take up on footpaths — particularly in busy areas, where a lot of people create competing demands for that space.

The other one was drones. We have a couple of trials in Australia, and we may get one here in Perth — these are drones delivering mainly convenience items: coffees, fast food. ("I wouldn't mind getting my coffee in the morning from a drone." "Less and less reason now to actually step outside your front door — which in itself, I think, is frightening.")

As Babb's answers make clear, the smartest question about a smart city isn't "what technology can we add?" but who is it for, and what does it replace? Sometimes the answer is a sensor network or a digital twin. Often it's a slower street, a shared data set — or simply a park where a fenced-off drain used to be.

This conversation was recorded for The Future Of, a podcast powered by Curtin University and recorded on Whadjuk Noongar Country, with hosts David Karsten and Celeste Fourie. Links to the research referenced in this episode are available in the show notes on the podcast's official page.