Conditions and Virtues of Smart City Professionals

Over the past two decades in the smart city industry, one of the most disorienting and challenging experiences has been the need to explain what I once assumed were fundamental premises of the field. In many projects, even the most essential assumptions — those that should naturally underpin how smart city initiatives are conceived and delivered — have required clarification, justification, and, at times, persuasion.

In the below, I set out to present the core assumptions that, in my view, every professional entering the smart city domain should hold from the outset.

I hope these principles will serve as a guide for practitioners, enabling them to navigate uncertainty, make informed decisions, and align their work with outcomes that are not only innovative, but also sustainable and accountable over time.

Pioneering Innovation

One of the defining virtues of a smart city professional is the ability to act as a Pioneering Innovator — not merely adopting technology, but shaping what does not yet exist.

Every smart city project operates within a dual structure. Roughly 70% is grounded in what is already known: commercially viable technologies, proven systems, and implementable solutions. This is the domain of execution. But the remaining 30% lies beyond certainty. It is undefined, untested, and often uncomfortable. Yet this is not a weakness in the project — it is its very essence.

This 30% is where the future is negotiated. It requires professionals to rigorously analyze market trends, forecast technological trajectories, and synthesize emerging tools to manifest the future. This requires not only technical literacy, but strategic imagination. Not only foresight, but the courage to act without complete information.

Smart city innovation also unfolds across fragmented institutions, competing interests, and asymmetrical power structures. Leading such innovation to successful implementation requires more than designing systems; it demands the ability to align actors — to mediate, negotiate, and build consensus in environments where clarity is limited and resistance is inevitable.

Smart city practitioners need to accept that there is no blueprint for what has never existed. The work is iterative, uncertain, and at times exhausting. But it is precisely within this tension — between the proven 70% and the unknown 30%, between conflict and alignment — that true innovation emerges.

Successfully navigating and resolving this tension to make the impossible real will be the greatest reward you will find in this field — the fulfillment of turning uncertainty into impact, and possibility into reality.”

Past-Future Intelligence

At first glance, there appears to be no shortage of information on smart city projects and cases. As smart city professionals, we are constantly exposed — through reports, YouTube content, and promotional materials — to examples of deployed solutions and citizen services. This is why cases such as Singapore’s digital twin, Woven City’s autonomous mobility, and Barcelona’s sensor networks are so widely recognized. They are highly visible, easily communicable, and often positioned as symbols of innovation.

However, a more fundamental question must be asked: Is knowledge of the latest technologies sufficient for smart city professionals? The answer is clearly no. While understanding emerging technologies is undoubtedly important, it represents only one dimension of the knowledge required in practice. Even within this domain, access to meaningful insights is often constrained — whether due to rapid innovation cycles, proprietary limitations, or the tendency for available materials to be overly theoretical, fragmented, or excessively technical. As a result, practitioners often struggle to translate available information into actionable knowledge.

What is more critically needed — and far less available — is practical knowledge about how these technologies are actually implemented and governed. This includes how projects are financed, how roles and responsibilities are distributed among public and private actors, how institutional and regulatory frameworks are structured, and how stakeholder conflicts are managed over time.

The processes of implementation and governance are not inherently inaccessible; rather, they remain insufficiently documented. The case of Songdo smart city exemplifies this gap. While considerable attention has been directed toward the technologies deployed, far less is understood about the processes that enabled the project to materialize. Had its development been systematically documented over the past two decades, the implementation and operational pathways of subsequent large-scale initiatives — such as Saudi Arabia’s NEOM The Line or Korea’s national pilot smart cities in Sejong and Busan — might have been more efficient, predictable, and strategically informed. Such documentation could have reduced redundant trial and error, enabling more deliberate design decisions and accelerated execution. Instead, in the absence of accumulated knowledge, each new project is compelled to relearn similar lessons — often through costly and avoidable inefficiencies.

The future of smart cities will depend not only on technological advancement, but on the institutional discipline to capture, structure, and disseminate knowledge of implementation and governance. Systematically recording processes, decisions, and lessons learned is essential to transforming isolated experience into collective intelligence. Ultimately, the true intelligence of smart cities lies not in innovation alone, but in the accumulated wisdom of practice. It is not too late to begin. The knowledge we choose to document today will shape the cities we are capable of building tomorrow.

[embed]The commitments presented in this SPARKCTIY video reflect the principles I hope more widely recognized and adopted in the smart city community.

Place People at the Core

Smart city professionals should ensure that every decision — from planning to operation — is guided by a clear and consistent commitment to improving citizens’ quality of life.

The smart city industry has grown in large part through its recognition by IT companies such as IBM and Cisco as a new and promising business market. Their role as pioneers has brought undeniable benefits: cutting-edge technologies have been introduced into the urban domain, accelerating innovation and expanding what cities can potentially achieve. In parallel, this shift has led national and municipal governments to increasingly view smart cities as strategic platforms for building and strengthening technological sovereignty — further reinforcing the momentum behind technology-driven urban development.

Yet this very dynamic has also produced a critical imbalance. In many cases, the question of which technologies to adopt begins to overshadow the more fundamental question of whose problems are being solved. As a result, smart city initiatives risk becoming showcases of innovation rather than instruments of meaningful change. The pursuit of the “latest” often inadvertently obscures the true purpose of smart cities.

At its core, a smart city exists to improve citizens’ quality of life by addressing urban challenges through information and communication technologies. This definition makes one point clear: citizen well-being must remain central. Technology — particularly ICT — must be treated as a means, not an end. Success should not be measured by technological sophistication, but by tangible improvements in everyday life.

When technological ambition begins to override human considerations, it becomes the responsibility of smart city professionals to restore balance. Placing people at the core requires a disciplined mindset — one that prioritizes relevance over novelty. The virtue of a smart city professional lies not only in deploying the most advanced technology, but also in selecting the most appropriate one, ensuring alignment with real needs, usability, and long-term impact.

Sustainable Impact

One of the chronic yet underexamined challenges in the smart city industry lies in the systematic underestimation — or outright neglect — of the operational phase. Much of this stems from the inherently pioneering nature of smart city solutions and services. A disproportionate share of attention, resources, and institutional energy is concentrated in the planning and implementation stages. The result is a familiar but critical pattern: systems are built, but not sustained.

In practice, many smart city projects exhaust their financial and organizational capital during deployment. By the time systems become operational, insufficient budget allocations remain for long-term management, maintenance, and iterative improvement. More critically, institutional arrangements often fail to designate accountable entities — whether departments or individuals — with both the capacity and the ownership required to oversee ongoing operations. Without clearly defined responsibility and sustained commitment, even well-designed services gradually degrade, and in many cases, are ultimately discontinued.

Annual operation and maintenance (O&M) of smart city solutions or services costs typically range from 10 to 20 percent of initial IT system investment and securing qualified personnel who can manage systems effectively — while operating within constrained public-sector budgets — remains a persistent challenge. The emergence of AI-driven urban systems further amplifies these concerns. Compared to conventional smart city solutions, AI-based services demand significantly higher operational expenditures, as well as more specialized expertise in data governance, model lifecycle management, and algorithmic accountability. In this context, operation is no longer a back-end function — it becomes a central determinant of system reliability, public trust, and long-term policy impact.

This calls for a fundamental shift in how smart city projects are conceived and executed. Smart city professionals must adopt an approach in which sustainable impact is embedded as a core design principle — not treated as an afterthought.

Operation must be integrated from the earliest stages of planning, rather than relegated to a residual or downstream concern. This entails incorporating lifecycle costing into project design, establishing clear governance structures with defined accountability, and securing sustainable funding mechanisms that extend beyond initial deployment. Equally critical is the cultivation of institutional capacity — ensuring that responsible organizations possess not only the necessary technical expertise, but also the authority and incentives to operate and adapt systems effectively over time. Ultimately, the success of a smart city should be measured not only by how innovatively it is built, but by how reliably and sustainably it is operated.