Cities are currently home to half of the world’s population, and they are expected to add another 2.5 billion people by 2050. As urbanization outpaces infrastructural development, ensuring a good quality of life for residents across the globe is becoming a pressing priority. Recognition of the need to address this challenge exists on both local and global levels. One of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 is to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.”

Meanwhile, in the era of digital transformation, Internet connectivity has extended into the everyday urban landscape. In hundreds of cities, from New York to Singapore, Internet of Things (IoT) devices collect and analyze data. National and municipal leaders are increasingly turning toward smart city technologies as the key to improving the quality of urbanization. When used and managed ethically and responsibly, smart city technologies have the potential to improve quality of life from multiple angles, including public safety, environmental sustainability, and healthcare. Effective transformative technology applications for cities combine the best of smart city technology and positive psychology to create more well-being, happiness, and resilience for city-dwellers.

Well-being as a Public Good

Recent advancements in positive psychology have made it possible to define, measure, and increase well-being at scale. Collective well-being is an established concept, and data associated with it have been gathered at the national level for years. International organizations including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as private entities such as the global analytics firm Gallup, have developed subjective and objective metrics of well-being. The Kingdom of Bhutan has its multidimensional index of Gross National Happiness (GNH), which is a constitutionally enshrined concept rooted in the philosophy that happiness should be pursued as a common public good. To calculate GNH, multiple rounds of face-to-face interviews were conducted with thousands of residents throughout the country to gather data on living standards, health, education, governance, ecological diversity and resilience, time use, psychological well-being, cultural diversity and resilience, and community vitality. The United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics has also developed a Measures of National Well-being Dashboard on which it publishes data for indicators including personal well-being, relationships, health, activities, living circumstances, personal finance, economic factors, education, governance, and the natural environment. Both approaches incorporate an understanding of well-being in the Aristotelian sense; they assess multiple indicators of eudaemonia (“living well and doing well”) in addition to self-reported feelings of happiness.

In recent years, city governments have increasingly been recognizing that well-being can be measured and influenced at the municipal level. For example, the European Commission has published findings on perceived quality of life perceptions in European cities from its Flash Eurobarometer surveys. There are also a growing number of efforts to capture aspects of well being unobtrusively through technology, and smart city technologies can gather objective data for areas of well-being by gathering data on external conditions of life. Cities generate oceans of data, and as they get smarter, they become more livable and responsive. The McKinsey Global Initiative (MGI) found in a study of three sample cities that cities can use digital solutions to save 30–300 lives per year (in a city of 5 million), reduce the crime burden by 30–40%, lower the disease burden by 8–15%, shave 15–30 minutes off of the daily commute, save 25–80 liters of water per person per day, and boost emergency response time by 20–35%. Overall, existing applications have the potential to improve quality-of-life indicators by 10–30%. In the words of the MGI report, “Although they are only one part of the full tool kit for making a city great, digital solutions are the most powerful and cost-effective addition to that tool kit in many years.”

Digital Solutions for Quality of Life

Along this logic, China, which is facing particularly accelerated urbanization rates, is betting on digital solutions to meets its residents’ quality-of-life needs. Of over 1,000 smart cities in existence or under construction, 500 pilot cities are in China. China’s National Tourism Administration has also launched a “National Smart Tourism Cities” initiative in 33 pilot cities. Across the region, Asian cities are achieving exceptionally high adoption of smart city applications and are the strongest performers globally in smart city technology awareness, usage, and satisfaction.

In the United Arab Emirates, the Smart Dubai Initiative aims to make Dubai “the happiest city in the world.” A cornerstone of the strategy is participation from a wide array of city stakeholders in sharing subjective data through the Happiness Meter, an interactive digital technology that asks users to express their sentiment after using any public service or interacting with any institution.

The overlapping of digital interfaces with traditional infrastructure to improve quality of life can occur not only at a municipal level to create smart cities but also at a more localized level to create smart spaces. Stōk, a global real estate service provider, has made a financial case for high-performance buildings (HPBs) designed to benefit the wellness–and thus, the productivity–of the people who occupy them, which in turn helps make companies more profitable. HPBs are based on the premise that buildings that are designed to enhance the occupant experience will foster productivity, comfort, and health while reducing energy use and environmental impact. Stōk points to a growing body of evidence linking human productivity, satisfaction, and health to key design elements including indoor air quality and ventilation, thermal comfort, natural and artificial lighting attuned to circadian rhythms, noise and acoustics, ergonomics, and views and biophilia. It estimates that HPB environments enhance productivity by 9%, not only helping make companies more profitable but also providing them with a valuable means of employee retention.

Opportunities and Challenges

Plenty of opportunities and unknowns still remain on the horizon. Cities across Asia, North America, and Europe have strong technology bases, yet even the most advanced cities still have a long way to go in building smart city fundamentals and achieving widespread adoption. They will need to consider the potential shortcomings of crowdsourced data in terms of accuracy and representativeness. The more that physical space intersects with cyberspace, the more critical robust cybersecurity will be to address potential vulnerabilities of smart cities. Perhaps most fundamentally, as they design and implement digital solutions for their cities, leaders will need to think carefully about what “well-being” means to them, what the indicators for it are, and how to ensure that it is cultivated equitably.