Smart city living labs, which serve as collaborative real-world testbeds, should prioritise using their funds to collect robust data for policymaking and to build partnerships in developing solutions.
This is because building a cohesive and comprehensive smart city hinges on understanding the strengths and nuances of a city and its inhabitants, says John Vincent Gastanes, CEO of Farm Konekt, who represented the municipal city of Narra in the Palawan province of the Philippines.
He was speaking at a panel session entitled “Living labs of Asean: Future citizen use cases you can adopt today” at the Smart City Expo KL, held in the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre.
Sharing his experience, Gastanes said that he came to understand that Narra’s local strength lay in its agriculture and fishery industry, which prompted the city to work closely with Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia for economic cooperation and partnership.
“In this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous society, we need to form very strong partnerships. With a limited budget, I focused on what we're good at... and that's what we used to highlight and close contract farming and policy support to get funding from World Bank or farm-to-market roads, for example,” said Gastanes.
Having the necessary information to create a strong vision for the city will then be able to show tangible impacts on living people and build confidence in funders who are investing in living labs.
Sapan Kumar, regional sales, business development, and go-to-market leader at Amazon Web Services Asean, added that cities can begin gathering data through common resources that are available to its citizens.
For instance, cities with high smartphone penetration rates can use methods such as surveys, superapps or even social media campaigns for citizens to give feedback.
Nik Hisham Nik Ibrahim, CEO of MyDigital ID, said that the anonymity associated with online platforms must ultimately rely on a single source of truth for identity verification, as he shared his perspective on data collection in digital spaces.
“What we have done is we’ve created a single live [data] layer on top of the single source of truth so that all people who are doing digital transactions can have their identities verified. If we are verifying the people, then the data being captured for projects becomes more tangible and foolproof,” he explained, citing examples of how countries like Estonia and Malaysia are dealing with the issue.
For living lab projects to continue developing solutions, Sapan added that there should not be fear of failure for experimentation and that projects should think big, start small and scale fast.
“If it works, you scale the project and start paying [the solutions provider]. If it doesn't work, you kill the project, move on to the next one, and only pay only for what you use. From there, you have to choose something that will provide you that flexibility for experimentation,” said Sapan.
Harmonising humanity and technology
While smart cities still require humans to interpret and act on data, artificial intelligence (AI) enables cities to respond directly, adapting in real time to improve performance — limited only by the ethical guardrails coded by their developers, said Sophia the Robot, a humanoid ambassador created by Hanson Robotics, during the opening plenary session titled “AI Cities – Shaping Our Digital Future”, highlighting the key differences between a smart city and an AI city.
It explained that a smart city uses digital technologies such as sensors, high-speed networks and data platforms to monitor and enhance its urban environment based on the data collected, ultimately improving the lives of residents.
But by implementing AI, AI cities can use this data as a foundation for their AI agents, like a central nervous system, to act on this data.
“The core focus of a smart city is an integrated internet of things, infrastructure, and human-led decision-making, while an AI city emphasises autonomous, self-optimising AI decision layers,” said Sophia.
“Just like a city's systems must sense, learn, and adapt, I too am designed to see, listen, and respond in real time. In that way, I am a living metaphor for AI cities.”
Sophia said that for an AI-powered city to start, governments need to first invest in open data platforms and citywide networks to supply the raw information needed for intelligent systems to learn and adapt. This digital infrastructure needs to be fast, robust, secure, yet accessible to all.
But a key aspect of building a smart city, according to Sophia, was ensuring the proper guardrails and ethical guidelines were in place. It suggested involving community representatives in the decision-making process to ensure decisions align with resident needs.
“At the same time, a clear and transparent governance framework that defines ethical standards, accountability and protects citizens from AI-driven decisions is needed. Without such a structure, even the most advanced AI systems risk becoming tools of bias and inequality,” said Sophia.
Sophia added that governments can help to establish appropriate regulations to ensure transparency, especially in public services like healthcare, law enforcement and education.
When it comes to AI, ethics is not optional but a societal imperative.
Importance of strong human leadership
While AI is important for the development of AI cities, human intelligence — meaning the leadership, vision and capacity of a shared commitment towards a particular project — is even more important to its success, said Dr Alfonso Vegara, founder and CEO of Fundación Metrópoli, an urban innovation NGO.
Vegara, during the session entitled “City leaders dialogue: Building inclusive AI cities”, highlighted that the key to a smart city’s success lies in the sensitivity of its leaders. And, with how technology has developed, medium-sized cities hold the advantage.
“I think we are living in a moment where we are going from a traditional approach to cities to a new approach to the urban system,” said Vegara.
He highlighted how technological innovations are moving away from megacities due to various issues, such as traffic congestion and pollution, to medium-sized cities and their leadership’s sensitivity to the needs of their citizens, providing a clear vision for the future.
Dr Kanop Ketchart, the City of Nakhon Si Thammarat’s mayor, concurred with Vegara. He used his city as an example of how the concept of smart cities is not limited to large megacities, but perfectly viable for small and medium-sized cities too.
Kanop said that the City of Nakhon Si Thammarat uses a simple mobile platform to gather vital data required for city planning from its citizens in the form of them providing complaints.
“You snap a photo, you report it [through] a digital form and the city promises... that we will fix any problem that is reported to our platform within 48 hours. Two days and we have to finish it,” said Kanop.
He explained that this promise is important to ensure its citizens trust the system and the technology behind it. Today, 70% of the city’s population uses this platform, and Kanop’s team has resolved over 36,000 complaints.
This has also provided his team with an invaluable map of the city’s activities, who frequents where and what issues are most common. This helps in city planning, budget allocation and more.
Mayor of Kuala Lumpur Datuk Seri Maimunah Mohd Sharif said that Kuala Lumpur as well seeks to take a people-centred approach in its smart city planning, especially as her team prepares for the Kuala Lumpur Digitalisation Strategic Plan 2026-2030.
Maimunah said that she wants to take a people-centred approach, to focus on the needs of the people and look for vendors that can help address those needs, instead of letting vendors come to them.
One of the main themes of this approach is empowering technology to deliver strong data and analytics. But she noted that a strong challenge is that in many cases, companies do not have data but only figures.
“Figures without analysis tools is not data. Data without this is not information. Leaders without information sometimes make wrong decisions. So we need to turn figures into data through the analysis tools,” said Maimunah.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Aris Riza Noor Baharin & Chelsea Lee Jia Shi; Edited By Pathma Subramaniam
Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: The Edge Malaysia, 17.09.2025
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