(Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, 2019)
Cities are the new artificial intelligence frontier, as technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Big Data are increasingly part of the daily routine of urban living. Why? Cities are conduits for cultures, trends, and social realities. This is why you can spot brutalist buildings from the 1960s all over the world. This is why ancient Egyptian motifs appear across continents, or even why certain buildings might remind you of a particular person, era, or culture. Like everything else, cities follow trends and are products of their time.
In our rapidly industrializing, globalizing, and growing world, cities are championed as a solution to myriad problems, from economic woes to climate resilience. Within this urban focus, new cities have become a “solve-all” to address the demands of population growth, attract tourism, reduce crime, and much more (Moser & Côté-Roy, 2020). In 2009, 50% of the world’s population lived in cities. By 2050, 70% of the population is expected to live in urban areas (Suzuki, 2017). As a result, new cities are often presented as an easier solution to urban problems than expanding or reworking existing cities. Globally, cities are struggling with problems like ageing infrastructure, booming populations with nowhere to go, and environmental threats. Starting from scratch seems easier than untangling the complicated web of existing urbanism. Of course, both things can be true: we can address urban problems through reconfiguring or expanding existing cities, but doing so isn’t necessarily the correct or appropriate choice.
What is a “New City”?
Traditionally, we think of cities as settlements that grow and evolve over time, expanding and adding resources. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day. However, completely new cities are being built all over the world. There is no consistent definition of a “new city,” but they are exactly what they seem: master-planned urban areas, built from scratch with their own administrative, geographic, and social infrastructure.
Although this idea may be unfamiliar, new master-planned cities have always existed. Colonial-era cities, like Kingston, Canada or Lagos, Nigeria, were master-planned by the British Empire. “Modernist” cities—like Brasilia, Brazil or Chandigarh, India—were master-planned in the same architectural style of the 1960s. Cities like Masdar in the United Arab Emirates or Egypt’s New Administrative Capital (NAC) are modern-day examples. Cities have always been political tools, used to shape our social and cultural environment. Just like with changes made in existing cities, new cities follow the same trends on a larger scale (Moser & Côté-Roy, 2020).
In fact, countries all over the world are creating planning documents, often in the form of “Vision 20__,” to concretize the role and goal of cities in the changing world order. Below are examples from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Rwanda, Vietnam, Mongolia, Egypt, Qatar, and Senegal.
(Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, n.d.; Kingdom of Bahrain Ministry of Finance and National Economy, 2025; State of Kuwait Ministry of Foreign Affairs, n.d.; Republic of Rwanda, n.d.; United Nations Development Programme, 2024; Vision 2025 Mongolia, n.d.; Ministry of Planning, Economic Development & International Cooperation, 2025; Amiri Diwan, 2025; Collectif des Volontaires du Sénégal, 2023)
Kinds of New Cities
Why are these cities being built? What purpose do they serve? New cities have become normalized as a development strategy, particularly in the Global South. Countries see new cities as pathways to ignite economic growth and attract new industry. Driven by increasing global interconnectedness and rapid urbanization, cities are being built for diverse purposes:
The new city trend has intensified since the late 1990s, with over 150 new cities built or in development in more than 40 countries, excluding China. It is important to note that China has a complicated, multi-tiered urban classification system that makes it hard to include the country in these kinds of statistics (Moser & Côté-Roy, 2020).
In the age of AI, the new city trend is increasingly focusing on smart cities, in which the ubiquitous use of tech is promised to lead to a better urban life (Moser & Côté-Roy, 2020).
(Korea Land & Housing Corporation, n.d.)
What is a Smart City?
Much like the term “new city,” “smart city” also does not have a consistently agreed upon definition. However, the European Commission provides a useful one: “cities using technological solutions to improve the management and efficiency of the urban environment” (n.d.).
Essentially, smart cities are cities that explicitly integrate technology into the services, functions, and governance of the city. The idea is that urban data can be analyzed to optimize solutions and guide development (Yang et al., 2021). For example, public transportation ridership data can help cities develop more efficient routes.
New cities are underpinned by the idea that existing urban strategies cannot solve new urban problems (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, 2019). Smart cities posit that urban networks and services are made better and more efficient with the integration of technology (European Commission, n.d.).
(Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, p. 18, 2019)
Case Study: South Korea
East Asia is famous for its technological development and innovation, nowhere more than South Korea. Unsurprisingly, this expertise has helped South Korea become one of the most famous countries for smart city design.
South Korea was the first country to enact a smart city-related law, with the Ubiquitous City (U-City) Act in 2008. The U-City policy sought to integrate various physical infrastructure facilities into a comprehensive distributed information platform (Kwak & Lee, 2023). The 4th Smart City Comprehensive Plan (2024-2028) splits South Korea’s plan to solve urban problems into three sections: 1) National Model Cities, 2) National Strategy Research & Development, and 3) Smart Challenge Project.
National Model cities are world-class smart cities created on blank slates. National Strategy Research and Development is meant to demonstrate advancements in smart tech. The Smart Challenge Project encourages public and private sectors to discover and demonstrate new solutions that reflect citizen demand in existing cities.
South Korean Policy
The smart city plan is supported by two policies: The 5th Comprehensive National Land Plan (2020-2040) and the Comprehensive Plan for the Intelligent Information Society (‘23-’25). The 5th Comprehensive National Land Plan presents detailed strategies for creating intelligent national space and innovative national land management, with smart cities and digital twins as key policy tools.
The Comprehensive Plan for the Intelligent Information Society aims to establish world-class digital capabilities and transform the government, economy, and society into a digital-friendly structure, including a full-scale launch of a digital platform without barriers between ministries. It wants to safely connect, integrate, and utilize public data and services by building a cloud-based integrated platform and establishing a “super-large AI utilization infrastructure” to enhance public services and create an innovation testbed.
These three categories are meant to address urban environmental changes and megatrends: digital transformation and urban space innovation, climate crisis response and carbon neutrality, domestic population decline and widening regional disparity, as well as acceleration of social change due to technological advancement (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, 2024).
In a fully realized smart city, data hubs will connect urban data with AI and digital twins. A digital twin is a digital recreation of an object, person, system, or process. In the case of smart cities, data twins are the most useful type of digital twin as they allow real time data to be digitally modeled. For example, Google Maps is a digital twin of the Earth that uses traffic data to optimize your route. System twins, a type of digital twin that models the interactions between physical and digital processes are also useful (McKinsey & Company, 2024).
South Korean Research
Smart cities set out to solve particular problems, whether present or future. In South Korea, existing urban areas are plagued by a variety of challenges: fine dust, energy inefficiency of old buildings and infrastructure, aging populations, traffic congestion, large-scale disasters in cities, and the inefficiency of administrative services. To solve these problems, cities do their research. Depending on the criteria, many cities across the world can be considered “smart.” City planners in South Korea take inspiration from cities in Europe, Asia, and America (Yang et al., 2021).
(Yang et al., 2021)
Across these “smart cities,” South Korea’s research notes that digital mapping, smart grids, open urban data, traffic sensing, and rising technological trials are important innovations. This research was used by the Korea Land & Housing Corporation to develop a layered structure of smart city infrastructure, data, and services.
(Yang et al., 2021)
South Korean Technology
What do smart cities look like in practice? Korea’s urban development agency—the Land & Housing Corporation—views smart cities as: A solution for urban problems, improving the quality of life of residents utilizing 4th industrial revolution Smart City technology, and a platform to pursue the city’s sustainable prosperity and foster new industries (Korea Land & Housing Corporation, n.d.). The goal is a “city of data,” in which citizens actively produce and provide data that the city uses to improve itself (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, 2019).
In Sejong National Model City, the focus is mobility and smart transportation. Two autonomous shuttles, two demand-responsive buses, 11 shared cars, and 15 smart parking lots have been designed for a planned population of 22,000 people. Likewise, Sejong city is developing its own “mobility as a service” (MaaS) system (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, 2024). This will allow residents to book, plan, and pay for transportation through an integrated unified platform that includes private and public transportation. The goal of MaaS is to offer flexible transportation options based on the need (Canadian Urban Institute, 2023). In addition to its primary focus, Sejong is also a pilot city for AI, data hubs, smart healthcare, and smart logistics.
On the other hand, Busan National Model City is focused on being an eco-friendly, zero-energy, waterfront city. Its representative services are unmanned robots—for tasks like security and delivery—and renewable energy (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, 2024). As of December 2021, Busan had a ‘Smart Village,’ a “56-unit living lab-type single-family home complex” to test pilot city implementation technology (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, p. 28, 2024). Busan is designed to promote urban planning technology development using AI based on extensive urban Big data.
Returning to digital twins, both the Sejong and Busan National Model City projects were built based on a digital twin model. The goal for smart cities is to create a cooperative system between AI-data hubs and digital twins, allowing city planners to test AI-supported solutions almost instantly (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, 2024).
A World Beyond South Korea
As smart city research tells us, different smart cities have different goals. In more developed nations, smart cities focus on how to solve urban problems of existing cities with smart technology, how to make existing cities smarter, and how to best benefit citizens. In developing countries, smart cities often focus on efficiency, promotion of tourism, city extensions, and the role of both civilian and public sectors (Yang et al., 2021).
On an environmental and political note, new cities are increasingly being built in the Global South. Furthermore, urban policy is increasingly circulating solely through the Global South, rather than being a traditional North-South transfer. Wealthier Global South countries are increasingly becoming the source of urban ideas and policy, in addition to consulting on other countries’ city-building. These countries are able to sell services and, in some cases, untested ideas to other countries, promising development and prosperity. New city models are positioned as “scalable urban solution[s], transferable anywhere in the world, regardless of context” (Côté-Roy & Moser, p. 2402, 2019). Countries are increasingly taking on debt or huge risks by building new cities, ignoring existing cities and their problems.
Many countries across the globe have smart city programs. Most are focused on urban data and platforms, like Japan’s PLATEAU system, the UK’s Data-centric London, or Singapore’s Smart Nation Sensor Platform (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, 2024). Countries that are ahead of the curve—either due to time, money, or global power—are selling their smart city model to other countries. South Korea’s smart city program has a section called “overseas expansion of Korean smart cities” that details customized smart city consulting for overseas cities, support for overseas development through selection and concentration, and support for the overseas expansion of Korean smart cities (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, 2024). Through the K-City network project, 41 projects were supported in 23 countries between 2020 and 2024. Demand for new city development is booming, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. Countries are increasingly thinking about how to tailor smart services—like integrated platforms, smart streetlights, and smart transportation—to their local conditions.
Nations that are ahead of the curve are able to claim expertise based on policy tourism and innovative ideas. Unbuilt city projects can even become exportable models (Moser & Côté-Roy, 2020).
Implications
So, why should we care about smart cities? Smart cities are at the intersection of bigger ethical questions: privacy, data ownership, and profit.
Urban data has become integral to city life, collected from sources ranging from public transit to cell towers. But where does this data collection end? Cities are now marked by “dataification,” or the exponential expansion of volume, type, and specificity of data being generated. Smart cities contend that linking city systems and infrastructure makes cities better and more efficient. While that can certainly be true, more and more data about our daily lives is being captured. Smart cities are increasing “dataveillance”—using data sets to identify, monitor, track, and predict—and “geosurveillance”—tracking the location and movement of people, vehicles, goods, and services. For example, CCTV cameras can zoom, move, and track individual pedestrians, and smart cities want to install more of them to track everything from crime to public space usage (Kitchin, 2016). Smart cities in Asia are collecting constant biometric data to detect emergencies for those deemed “high risk,” like senior citizens or immunocompromised people (Yang et al., 2021).
Furthermore, the emerging technological landscape is complex, fragmented, and confusing. Smart city technologies are increasingly composed of multiple interconnected and intersecting systems run by both private and public actors. This tangled network makes roles, obligations, and liability hard to uncover. How do you find out who owns your data? How can you gain access to it? As systems become increasingly sophisticated, how can we truly know who is doing what with our data? The explosion of data has also eroded data minimization principles, in which data is captured only for a specific purpose, used solely for that purpose, and deleted afterward. The Smart City seeks to gather as much data as possible because more data is equated with better services and optimization (Kitchin, 2016).
Cities are conduits for cultures, realities, and trends… in this case, it’s the rise of technology. As our lives get increasingly entangled with technology, so do our cities. The question is no longer ‘Should technology be a part of our cities?,’ but ‘How do we integrate technology into urban frameworks and how far should we let that go?’
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