Smart Cities Need Values, Not Just Technology: Ethics, AI and Public Space

What Makes a City Smart? Wellbeing Before Bandwidth

The Smart Cities Council convenes cities, the private sector and academia through education programs, events and thought leadership on policy, technology innovation and use cases. Under Corey’s leadership it is pivoting to be values and mission led rather than technology driven, which he feels is where a lot of similar organisations sit.

The starting point is a puzzle. By the conventional metrics of government, people in the West are living longer and wealthier than ever, yet Corey sees growing unhappiness, poor mental health and high rates of overweight and obesity. The Council’s answer is Healthspan, a wellbeing initiative designed to understand the fundamentals of a thriving community. Our happiest moments, Corey points out, involve friends and family, good food, stories and laughter in a beautiful place, and “none of that has been in the discussion”.

It is a direction that is gaining international weight. UN-Habitat’s people-centred smart cities programme is built on the principle that technology and innovation should be used to support sustainability, inclusivity, prosperity and human rights in cities.

Smart Cities, AI Ethics and the Erosion of Trust

As technology spreads, ethics has become the biggest conversation in the sector. Corey recently presented at the OECD in Paris, at its fifth roundtable on smart cities, on the stoic idea of understanding what you can and cannot control, then applying your values carefully to the few small things you can influence.

His concern is trust. He argues that a vacuum in narrative between government and citizens has been eroding it, at a time when it is harder to tell fact from fiction. He also suggests the body of recorded human knowledge is now doubling every 18 months, which leaves people struggling to find the wheat from the chaff. For placemakers, the lesson is that a smart city without trust is just a network of devices.

AI and the Future of Work: Ask What AI Cannot Do

Corey believes AI will force an existential moment for work and education. He estimates that generative AI could remove 40 to 60 per cent of jobs if vested interests were not holding them in place. These are his estimates rather than settled figures, but they frame his central challenge: “ask what AI can’t do, not what it can do.”
In his view, that is where people find their humanity, and where education needs to head, from convergent thinking, process and conformity towards creative thought. The high value roles of the future will belong to people who know what questions to ask and what data set they need, not simply to those who process data faster.

How New Mobility Could Reshape Urban Design

Corey expects urban design to change dramatically over the next two decades. Just as vertical transport once sent the wealthy to the top floors for the views, he thinks drones and eVTOL aircraft will bring people and freight back to rooftops, turning buildings upside down again. He predicts a 60 to 70 per cent reduction in cars in public spaces and on streets, freeing a significant portion of the urban landscape for reforestation. “Let’s hope we get it right,” he says.

That space is an opportunity to reintroduce nature through biophilic design and bio urbanism. The evidence is encouraging: a 2024 systematic review, summarised by the Global Wellness Institute, reported that biophilic hospital design was associated with lower stress and pain and shorter hospital stays. Corey’s broader point is about the everyday walk. Moving through Vienna, with its music, parks, art and architecture, is a very different experience to moving through East LA, and good urban design turns a journey from A to B into something people enjoy.

Public Space, Ownership and Democracy: Why Places Need Owners

Corey traces democracy back to the Greek Agora, the public square where people gathered because it was a place they wanted to be and felt safe in. That idea now sits at the core of the Smart Cities Council’s strategic plan, built around a line he attributes to Rumi: beyond right and wrong, there’s a garden. In the garden, he says, “you park your prejudices and everything else and you engage”.

Ownership is what makes public space work. Corey contrasts European cities designed around squares, where rich and poor, homes and workplaces mixed by necessity, with many US cities where people live, work and recreate in separate places and public space feels like someone else’s problem. His example of the alternative is Copenhagen, where a group of retired locals pick up tourist rubbish by Tivoli every day. “They feel like it’s theirs and they respect it and they protect it.” Good design, he says, makes the space a launching point for community, and he points to Australia’s First Nations peoples, with more than 65,000 years of continuous civilisation, as the deepest example of connection to place.

Storytelling: Why Some Cities Hold Onto Us

Corey’s last theme is narrative. New York, he says, has an identity that people adopt and wear on their sleeve, and it comes down to a story they want to be part of. Barcelona has it. So does Istanbul, a city he says makes no sense at all and that he loves anyway. “It comes back to the storytelling.” Urban narrative is now part of the Smart Cities Council’s work too, because places people love tend to be places with a story.

What Placemakers Can Take From This

• Design for the journey: make everyday walking routes enjoyable, with nature, art and reasons to linger.
• Build shared ownership: create spaces where people talk, trust one another and start to care.
• Lead with the question: before choosing the technology or the data set, ask what the community needs and what only people can do.

Corey’s advice to young people who want to work across many fields is to pursue truth and beauty obsessively and to be as honest as they can. People will exploit you, he says, but that is better than “dying with the music still in you”.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify, or download the transcript above to read along.