Smart cities need to be people-centered

The new concept of smart cities was shared by Mr. Nguyen Van Khoa, General Director of FPT, Chairman of Vietnam Software and Information Technology Services Association (Vinasa), at the 2025 Vietnam Smart City Awards Ceremony on the morning of December 23.

Citing Decree 269 of the Government issued in October on smart urban development, Mr. Khoa said that according to the new definition, a smart city is an urban area that operates based on data, digital technology and innovation. “In which people are the center, the government is the creator, businesses are the driving force, technology is the tool to optimize governance, improve quality of life, sustainable economic development and environmental protection,” Mr. Khoa said.

According to him, smart cities “are not synonymous with many sensors or software”, but are connections between four parties including government, businesses, people, communities, and interconnection of data, processes, policies and resources.

Requirements in Decree 269 also emphasize that smart urban development must be people-centered. Activities aimed at improving quality of life, optimizing services and utilities for the people; create conditions for people to participate in the process of management, operation, and monitoring of smart urban development. Digital infrastructure and services of smart cities must focus on the requirements of digital equity and minimizing the digital gap.

According to Vinasa Chairman, this is also the reason why this year’s smart urban assessment has many changes, in order to recognize the strong changes of provinces and cities, and at the same time select, introduce, and connect excellent technology products for urban areas and life, contributing to promoting smart and sustainable urban development for people’s happiness and economic development.

From the statistics of units participating in the smart urban award, Mr. Khoa said that Vietnam “is catching up very quickly with the trend”. Accordingly, Vietnamese cities have gone through the “movement” stage and entered the “substantive” stage. Specifically, technology has been introduced to solve some “pains” such as congestion, flooding, administrative procedures and energy saving. In addition, AI also enters every corner of life, from public services to security and order. At this year’s awards, Da Nang received the Vietnam Smart City Worth Living 2025 award voted by the people and won the Vietnam Smart City award for the sixth time.

One of the topics discussed a lot at the event was the applications of data and AI in operations.

According to a representative of VNPT AI, artificial intelligence gradually plays the role of the “brain” of the city when it has the ability to process, analyze and connect huge volumes of urban data in real time. AI does not stop at monitoring, but also helps cities shift to a smart, proactive and predictive operating model.

This is also the development trend of smart cities in phase 3.0 – operating based on data and AI, after the previous two stages of developing sensor infrastructure and digital services. On that basis, AI allows cities to understand, predict and make decisions instead of just reacting passively to incidents. Connecting data from many fields helps form an overall picture of the entire city’s activities.

This unit’s report shows that AI can help reduce congestion by 10-40% and handle incidents faster, while optimizing urban operating costs. In addition, another application of AI is to help each user have their own virtual assistant.

The representative of Da Nang, a city that won the Vietnam Smart City award six times, also emphasized that after officially implementing the project in 2018, urban management takes place in a digital environment, associated with data and artificial intelligence. The city’s open data portal has more than 1,500 open data in 17 different fields such as Industry, Economy, Information – Communications.

AI is also used by the city in many operations, such as detecting and warning about flooded spots, crowding at the one-stop department to arrange more officers, detecting crowds and tourists violating regulations at tourist areas…