Technology and urban research

From left to right: Mr. Ken Neo, Director of Research; Dr. Cheong Wei Yang, Vice Provost of Strategic Research Partnerships; 
Orlando Woods, Professor of Geography; Sayd Randle, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies; Jason Grant Allen, Associate Professor of Law

Human interactions are key to understanding and managing an increasingly urban planet, say panellists at Global Young Scientists Summit site visit to SMU. 

By Alvin Lee

SMU Office of Research – It is an oft-cited World Bank figure: 56 percent of the world’s population, or 4.4 billion people, currently live in urban areas. By 2050, those figures will be closer to 70 percent and nearly nine billion people.

Much attention has been paid to smart cities and how technical aspects such as the Internet of Things (IoT) can help in municipal management, but one should not overlook the ‘softer’ side of urban research.

“It’s important to understand the cultural, religious, and anthropological perspectives of the people within urban areas,” observes Dr. Cheong Wei Yang, SMU Vice Provost of Strategic Partnerships. “How do you understand the infrastructure, not just the hard infrastructure, but also the soft infrastructure, that ultimately shape the effectiveness of what your technology does to the lives of people?”

Dr. Cheong made those points as the moderator of a panel discussion on Urban Research at the Global Young Scientists Summit (GYSS) 2025 site visit to SMU. The panel members were: Orlando Woods, SMU Professor of Geography and Director of the SMU Urban Institute; Sayd Randle, SMU Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Urban Fellow of the SMU Urban Institute; and Jason Grant Allen, SMU Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Digital Law.

For Professor Woods, declining populations in the developed world and the corresponding immigration trends formed the basis of a major research interest and project.

“In 2011, the government issued a White Paper looking at increasing the number of migrants coming into Singapore to alleviate the problems of the declining population,” he says, referring to A Sustainable Population for a Dynamic Singapore: Population White Paper. “That's a problem that we see in many countries around the world. What is slightly unique to Singapore is the way that the government approaches diversity and the way that it manages multiculturalism, and racial and religious diversity in particular, which is generally very successful.

“What I thought would be a great research project is to actually understand the role of religion in enabling all these migrants coming into Singapore to integrate into Singapore society or not. Outside of formal policy frameworks of things such as the education system and visa regimes, we looked at the role of informal settings like churches, mosques, and temples where migrants encounter Singaporeans and possibly tensions could flourish or cohesion could be built.”

Like Professor Woods, Professor Randle is also a critical social scientist. Describing her research interest as “environmental change and the conflict and politics around that within cities”, Professor Randle’s latest research project is about water and energy storage.

“For cities and climate change, new arrangements of storing water and storing energy are going to become increasingly central to ways cities are able to function,” she says. “I'm launching a new project this summer in Nepal where there's a huge amount of hydropower and battery technology under consideration, to look at how this influx of infrastructures, which are meant to try and smooth out the provision of resources under new conditions of resource stress, are going to be reshaping politics, political economy, and urban metabolism.”

The good, the bad, and the tech

While not entirely obvious at first glance, the ‘softer side’ of urban research also involves technology, and specifically human-technology interaction. Professor Woods describes a project in Jakarta where Grab riders are used to map the city’s side streets that are missed by satellites.

“A lot of mobility in Jakarta is done through little lanes and alleyways that are very difficult to map using satellite technology. So what Grab did was to use their motorbike riders to participate in this mapping initiative, riding around with cameras on their helmets and also to give feedback on the maps to actually improve them. When combined with satellite technology, people can get from point A to point B using actual routes that local inhabitants use.

“Everybody today has some sort of relationship with technology. It might just be through their smartphone, and you might not understand the ins and outs of the algorithms and AI and all that. But everybody has a relationship to it and they will be positioned relative to technology in a particular way.”

The perceived ubiquity of increasingly complex and unexplainable technology has added additional layers to what were previously relatively simple solutions and answers. In response to a question about the difficulty of communicating scientific findings during the Q&A session, Professor Allen dove into the changes wrought by the internet and the resulting democratisation of information.

“For better or worse, we live in a time where expertise is increasingly negatively valorised in certain corners of our society; there's a widespread skepticism about experts and expertise,” he laments. “A large proportion of our societies are consuming information and trusting sources of information that are algorithmically driven, and that may be better serving the advertising revenue-based business model of the platform rather than the traditional values of, for example, a free and professional press.

“We live in a time where expertise is more important than ever, but a lot of people have had enough of experts, and sometimes not entirely without reason. I think that all of us as experts have a very important role to play in the digital transformation and in our own area of expertise. Finding new ways of communicating our expertise to the public is really crucial, and I think it's one of the great benefits to society that a university, as a civil society institution, provides.”
 

Back to Research@SMU February 2025 Issue