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Think of a city you grew up in, a city you admire, a city where you’ve spent most of your life. Is it a smart city, or a smart city in the making? And more importantly, do you have a narrative about that city? For me, my favorite city in the world is Chennai, in the south of India. Chennai is the city of resilience. It has only two kinds of climates: hot and hotter. On December 3rd, 2015, I woke up with 4.3 million other people to a very wet morning. Chennai had its heaviest rainfall in ten years. Very quickly, the city was in knee-deep water. When I looked out of my window, the road had turned into a river and people were using boats to move around. Businesses closed. Schools closed. People couldn’t stay in their homes because living rooms filled with water. Cars couldn’t move. ATMs didn’t work, so even money became useless for buying food. And on top of all this, the government did not respond on time. So what did people do? They didn’t wait. People of Chennai helped the people of Chennai. They learned to care, share, and trust strangers. Neighbors took in neighbors. Families shared limited food. That’s when I realized: when the human spirit can overcome floods, that’s resilience. And resilience is the value I look for in a city. Now I want to ask you: in the city you thought of, what value do you seek? And what’s your narrative about it? I’ve researched cities and smart cities for a long time. Singapore is renowned as one of the leading smart cities in the world. And yet I’m often surprised when policymakers say, “We want to make our city like Singapore.” Because you can’t copy and paste a city. Yes, you can replicate hard infrastructure: buildings, materials, even human resources. To some extent, you can replicate soft infrastructure: policies, processes, and laws, as long as you contextualize them. But you cannot replicate the one thing that makes a city a city: human beings, their values, their dreams, their hopes, their aspirations. That is integral to city-making. And this matters because cities matter. About 50% of the world’s population lives in cities today, and that number is expected to grow to two-thirds by 2050. If cities are that central to our future, we need to pay closer attention to how we build them. Sometimes I imagine cities as if they were a product, and we were all users of that product. Any designer would ask: who is the user? What are their needs, wants, and aspirations? You’d create personas and user journeys. Even if you pick just one user group, say “mothers,” you immediately see complexity: homemaker mothers, working mothers, single mothers. So imagine the complexity of a whole city. If you zoom into the life of a migrant worker, their smart-city narrative might be about livelihood: where they eat, where they live, what entertainment they can afford. If you ask a high-skilled expat, their narrative might be about a digital life. A local resident may have yet another narrative. So we may think we live in the same city, but we don’t. Any city is a superset of possible experiences, and each person only lives a subset. In a way, we each create our own version of the city. That’s why I’m concerned about the arrogance that can enter smart-city making: - a one-size-fits-all approach - a top-down approach - more about technology and less about people - more about one dominant narrative and less about integrating a plurality of narratives So the next time you hear “smart city,” ask: smart city, from whose point of view? From the government, experts, think tanks, and real-estate developers? Or from students, senior citizens, migrant workers, and low-income families? I attended a workshop titled “How to Help Low-Income Singaporeans.” People discussed inequality, how people fall through the cracks, and how the national narrative of meritocracy isn’t working. Near the end, a girl stood up and said, “I’ve listened to all of you, but none of you understand what a person from a low-income family goes through, because I come from one such family.” That moment was a reminder: without the narrative of the less influential, we get a lopsided picture—and we design the wrong solutions. I want to share another story, from when I lived in New Delhi in September 2008. The government had inaugurated a new subway, an underground path to cross the road. But it was pitch dark, day after day. I blamed the government: so much money spent, no electricity. Then one evening I saw light. Inside were rows of candles. Days, weeks, and months passed, and the candles were still there every evening. I needed to know who was doing it. One Sunday at 6 pm, I waited. A thin, short man with gray hair, wearing a kurta, walked in with candles. He laid them one by one and lit them. I stopped him and asked what inspired him. He said he was pained by what women, children, and senior citizens went through in that subway. One day he saw an old lady fall and hurt herself. He couldn’t sleep and kept asking, “What can I do? What can I do?” For nine months, every day from 5 to 10 pm, he came back each hour to light candles. He never asked for money or attention. He even called the electricity company to check when power would be restored. Here I was, blaming the government. And here was a citizen taking action. For him, New Delhi was a city of compassion—and he lived that value. If we lose these narratives of seemingly ordinary people, we miss the potential of what our cities could be. When I think of smart cities, I’m inspired by Aristotle. He described the city, the polis, as a partnership among residents. And the purpose of that partnership is the highest good of citizens: happiness and noble virtues. In that spirit, one example that stands out to me is the United Arab Emirates. In Dubai’s smart-city journey, they have a Minister of Artificial Intelligence to include technology in governance. But they also have a Minister of Happiness for well-being, and a Minister of Tolerance to support communal and racial harmony. In Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, data is at the center. But I want to propose something as important as data: narratives. If we can share data, can we also share narratives? Because narratives are social currency. When narratives circulate, they carry values. They communicate what people need, what people fear, and what people hope for—and that becomes a currency of change. Social media gives us a way to do this at scale. We know the power of hashtags: they aggregate and crowdsource narratives from different walks of life. If smart city includes a gender-sensitive city, we need narratives of what women experience. The hashtag #MeToo helped crowdsource those stories. The stories were different, but the underlying theme was change—and it pushed institutions and policymakers to rethink workplaces and safety. So when you think of a smart city, let’s take Singapore as an example. Can we create a hashtag like #MySingaporeStory? What if you shared your narrative of your Singapore, invited friends to share theirs, and let a collective set of narratives balance the dominant narratives of the most influential? So think of your city again. What value do you want in that city? What change do you want to see? Do you have a narrative to share? Go ahead, share it. Because narratives are a currency of change.