The keynote
Smart Cities Week Aotearoa brought together industry, local government and academia to ask how New Zealand’s cities can use data and technology to become more resilient and liveable. His keynote, delivered with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, brought the university’s research perspective to an audience of practitioners and public officials, and the RG UBE Lab recorded it in its report of the week.
The setting suited his research on Auckland, which asks why a city with strong digital public services still slides in international smart city and liveability rankings, and what it would take to turn data into decisions residents actually feel, in housing, congestion and access to services.
The programme
The two days covered:
- Lower carbon and healthier buildings, from the New Zealand Green Building Council
- A city centre digital twin, from Beca and Eke Panuku Development Auckland
- Systems thinking for climate resilience
- Digital technologies for resilient urban development
- AI in digital twins, from WSP
- The future of urban mobility
- Interactive healing environments, from AUT
Context
Speakers included Spark New Zealand, the Mayor of Auckland’s office at Auckland Council and Tourism Holdings, and the event was supported by AUT alongside Spark, Beca, Amazon Web Services, Christchurch City Council and Auckland Council. For the School, the week was one of several platforms on which it has argued for smarter, citizen centred cities, a theme that runs through his commentary on Auckland and his research on urban digital twins.
The wider argument
Events such as Smart Cities Week matter because the decisions that make cities smarter are spread across many organisations: councils, transport agencies, utilities, telecommunications companies, developers and consultancies. None of them can deliver a smart city alone, and each holds part of the data and part of the infrastructure. A national forum is one of the few places where they meet as peers.
A university keynote in that setting does a particular job. It can take a longer view than any single agency, draw on international evidence, and name the questions that commercial and political cycles tend to postpone, such as who owns urban data, how digital twins should be governed and whether investment is reaching the problems residents care about most.