Smart Cities: urban innovation needs people-centred guidelines

Seven out of 10 people are likely to be living in cities by the year 2050 compared with around half now, increasing both their contribution to, and vulnerability from, climate change. Given that cities are drivers of both innovation and economic growth, they must surely play a key role in devising smart solutions to low-carbon urban living.

While the primary focus should be on ways to reduce carbon emissions and improve the environmental efficiency of city dwellers’ lifestyles, the potential for technology to deliver improvements is once again on the agenda. Central to that is the idea of the smart city, which leverages data systems to gather information and deliver services.

It is a concept that has risen without trace (there is no commonly accepted author or definition), but it can be described as a synergy between humans, technological systems, and operational frameworks that collaborate across essential domains including healthcare, transport, education and infrastructure.

The debate over so-called smart city projects will move into the spotlight at the end of May 2025 when UN-Habitat, the United Nations’ agency for promoting environmentally sustainable towns and cities, will debate draft international guidelines on people-centred smart cities.

In the UN’s vision, smart cities are designed to help cities and communities ensure that digital innovation and smart technologies “meaningfully improve quality of life” for everyone, particularly the most vulnerable. If agreed, the guidelines will be a “non-binding framework” for rolling out smart city strategies, plans and regulations.

UN-Habitat says that its guidelines, which will be voted on by all 193 United Nations Member States at the summit in Nairobi, Kenya, in the week beginning 26 May, will ensure digital urban infrastructure and data contribute to making cities and human settlements “sustainable, inclusive, prosperous and respectful of human rights”.

Fututistic smart city? Photo by Conny Schneider on Unsplash

Contested claims

Inevitably, these claims are highly contested. For every claim about more efficient delivery, personalised services delivery and fully informed citizens, there are counterclaims of intrusive surveillance and predictive policing, exclusion of the vulnerable and the less technologically proficient, and a management agenda driven by the tech company whose equipment is installed. This is why efforts are needed to create codes and best practices for implementing these innovative systems, even if on a non-binding basis.

Examples in cities that can claim the “smart” description include Singapore, which uses digital sensors to collect data on citizens’ behaviour, enabling the measurement of aspects such as overcrowding, congestion times, and off-peak periods. Seven years ago, London mayor Sadiq Khan unveiled a 60-page plan (PDF) that includes initiatives on digital inclusion, healthcare innovation and smart infrastructure.

Like artificial intelligence, which has fuelled even more anxious debates about the pros and cons, the smart city is likely, slowly but surely, to become an integral part of how cities are developed, regenerated, and even built from scratch, such as Toyota’s Woven City in Susono City, Japan. Canute-like resistance may delay but not block its spread.

Many analyses of urban regeneration schemes have found that it is often the more vulnerable and less wealthy communities that find themselves disadvantaged or even displaced by the infrastructure that is put in place as part of the new investment. It is crucial that bodies such as UN-Habitat set rules that ensure smart cities do not foster a permanent apartheid between rich and poor areas.

The 21st century has established the smart city as a crucial urban planning framework. The significance of its potential impact on millions of people is immense, and it may indeed substantially contribute to aligning urban environments with net zero goals.

For successful implementation, however, it is essential that urban planners, local authorities, and central governments involve citizens in the development process and convince them about how these innovations will positively transform their daily lives and deliver genuinely sustainable cities.

A fresh perspective on smart cities demands both adopting innovative technologies and harmonizing business and government priorities while supporting the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals.

The UN-Habitat framework offers a significant chance to rethink city governance by putting citizens at the heart of technological advancement.

Beyond ‘slums’: rethinking urban informal settlements in the Global South

The pejorative word “slums” has made a reappearance in the mainstream Western media following the death of Pope Francis as mourners recalled his visits by bus to reach the poor shanty town areas of Buenos Aires where he was archbishop — giving him the nickname of the “slum pope”.

The word dates back to the 18th century and, while its origin is unknown, some speculate it might come from slime meaning a waste product from mining or German word for mud, schlamm — implying dirtiness — while others point to the stem for “slumber” i.e., somewhere to lay one’s head.

Its meaning as a description of squalid housing conditions became associated with the rapid urbanisation of western cities such as London and New York as the Industrial Revolution drew thousands of people into the expanding cities for work. As the influx outstripped the available housing, the new migrant workers had to make do with what they could find.

This led to the creation of slums whose common features can be summarised as heavily populated places that lacked public services and whose residents had inadequate housing and little if anything in the way of security of tenure.

Programmes of social house building such as council estates and housing projects as well as commercial developments led to slums being razed and the residents often displaced rather than rehoused. In London and  Britain’s first council estate, Boundary Green Estate that replaced the Old Nicol slum, saw only 11 of the original residents rehoused there.

Map of Old Nichol slum from Charles Booth's mapping Source psychogeographicreview

Redeveloped-Boundary-Estate-Housing_for_the_Working_Classes-Report-1912-1913-William-Edward-Riley

St Giles Rookery near the British Museum — immortalised by Patrick Hamilton in his book Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky — was bulldozed to make way for New Oxford Street as was The Devil’s Acre in Westminster that is now Victoria Street. Agar Town in Camden was demolished to make way for the railways to Scotland and the North of England.

No universal solution

In the 21st century, the focus of the debate has move to Latin America, Asia and Africa. Thanks to hit movies and media coverage there are many significant places that are known by name in terms of their slums —Kibera in Nairobi, Dharavi in Mumbai and huge areas of Mexico City.

Informal semi-legal housing is thus widespread across the world and is likely to become even more important over the coming years if forecasts of population growth are met. The United Nations says the global population will hit 9 billion by 2025, a rise of more than a third since 2020. But the urban population will grow faster, doubling to more than 7 billion and, of that, the number living in informal urban settlements will treble to 3 billion.

Kibera in Nairobi. Schreibkraft, CC BY-SA 3.0 httpscreativecommons.orglicensesby-sa3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

These forecasts have led to mounting concern about the potential impacts on slum dwellers and societies without some sort of intervention. This was crystallised by the American urban theorist Mike Davis in his best-selling book, Planet of Slums, in which he sets out an apocalyptic vision of cities expanding beyond their limits and growing beyond what might be deemed as acceptable.

To give an example, writing in 2006, he warned that cities had “absorbed nearly two thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week”.

UN-Habitat the United Nations’ sustainable urban development agency, in 2003 issued a report called Challenges of the Slums, which warned that the number of slum dwellers was “growing and will continue to increase unless there is serious and concerted action by all relevant stakeholders”. It was motivated by the growing concern over urban poverty and identified slums as physical and spatial manifestation of that and of inequality within cities.

This has encountered criticism from academics particularly those based in the Global South who argue that the word slums, which rose out of a specifically British and European experience of the Industrial Revolution, has connotations that are not appropriate for the informal settlements of the cities of the Global South.

These urban areas that are often peripheral to the more established city are not homogenous: there are many types of settlements varying by country. While they may look cramped and overcrowded to western eyes, that is a relative concept. Often the individual slum residents will build their own homes and will improve their housing as they get hold of the funding. These communities will often work together to gain political power, giving them a voice within the city government.

Another unwelcome echo is that the historic word slum is used as a justification to repeat European and American practice of evictions, removals and displacements, often to make way for real estate developers working alongside the government to build high-end buildings that will attract wealthier residents. Even if they are well intentioned, such programmes often have the opposite impact to that intended: driving the urban poor to the further fringes of cities where they are usually cut off from opportunities of work.

Policies based on lessons learned from urban developments in the Global North are unlikely to translate well to cities in the Global South. A whole new mindset is needed, that is based on the lived experiences of the people who live in communities in peripheral and informal settlements. Rather than take planning policies and theories developed 100 years ago, the focus should be on learning from the experiences of the multitude of different types of settlements. Instead of one universal truth there should be hundreds of lessons for building better cities.

The case for delivering genuinely sustainable new towns in Britain

Almost 800 years ago, King Edward I of England ordered a new town to be built to replace the port town of Winchelsea on the East Sussex coast that had been wiped away by a devastating storm. The monarch was motivated not just by care for his citizens but because of its strategic importance.

He took a top-down decision in 1288 to build a new town to replace the old and took a role in planning its design, whose grid-like format imitated existing models in neighbouring France. It fits what scholars now see as the generally accepted definition of a new town as a settlement built from scratch in an undeveloped area that is created by a government. Edward I followed up in 1296, with an edict for 24 new towns to be built.

Source: Archaeology Data Services

New Winchelsea, as it began life, was not the first in England (the Romans had gotten there first) nor in Europe and certainly not globally. The concept of creating a new town has been recorded in historical literature for centuries. Examples include new cities in ancient Phoenicia where they were called Kart-hadasht or “new city”. The names of both Carthage, in modern day Tunisia and Cartagena, in southern Spain, are a transliteration of the Phoenician word.

Now, some 737 years after Edward I set out his plans in Sussex, Charles III’s Labour Government is about to embark on a new town building programme as part of its mission to see 1.5 million homes built this parliament. Its New Towns Taskforce is expected to come back with a full report in July.

It issued an interim report in February 2025 following a nationwide evidence-gathering initiative, which was launched to help identify suitable locations, requesting submissions for areas capable of accommodating at least 10,000 homes.

This led to over 100 responses with the majority of suggestions coming from London, the south east, south west, and east of England, although each English region provided multiple proposals. Most of the suggested sites were extensions to existing urban areas such as towns or cities, while a smaller proportion consisted of proposals for entirely new, independent settlements.

This is not the first time Britain has been down this road. The determination of Ebenezer Howard to deliver a new type of city to avoid the social and health failures of the Industrial Revolution in major cities of London and Manchester led to the design and building of two garden cities — Letchworth and Welwyn in the first decade of the 20th century. Some 40 years later the post-war Labour government started the New Town programme that led to the creation of 32 towns housing 2.8 million people.

Their ultimate success will undoubtedly depend on the clarity of the vision that the taskforce will set out (although, of course, their development will be impacted by Harold Macmillan’s “events, dear boy”). The good news is that some concepts have been clearly laid out. Unsurprisingly, accelerating the delivery of new homes and especially affordable ones is near the top of the list. They must also unlock economic growth (in line with another key government pledge) by focusing on areas where job creation is held back by high housing costs.

The most encouraging element of the plan is the decision to learn from the successes and setbacks in those previous new town developments including the post-1945 new towns and also the more recent Eco-towns and Garden Communities. It sets out 120 principles that will be crucial to ensure that these urban developments are sustainable over the long term. This includes targeting environmental sustainability and ensuring there is the social infrastructure that was often missed out in some post-war development.

But it also includes perhaps less obvious, but even more important, ingredients for sustainability. One is ensuring that funding will be long term to deliver housing that can built but also maintained. There must also be a sustainable model of stewardship established at the outset, including well-defined leadership frameworks to ensure ongoing infrastructure maintenance. This sits alongside a need to set up robust ways for involving local residents in the shared vision and goals.

There is a clear need for new, well-planned towns with a large amount of high-density affordable homes to meet the demands of a growing population. The garden cities responded to the appalling conditions of industrial cities 125 years ago and the post-war New Town programme was a bipartisan response to the bomb-destruction of large areas of urban Britain.

Today’s crisis does not arise from a one-off shock event, but is the result of a failure to build enough homes to meet the demands of a growing population, spiralling costs of renting and buying the homes that are available, which has led to inequal outcomes for different groups of people, classes, regions and generations.

As the New Towns Taskforce has said, this interlocking crisis restricts workforce movement, damages health outcomes, interrupts learning, and postpones household creation, each bringing economic repercussions. New towns can help solve these issues by releasing economic opportunities in congested regions while advancing environmental responsibility through creative planning and speeding up good-quality construction of homes that will be valued for future generations.