How smart cities can bolster water management in the 21st century

Posted: October 30, 2025

Humans are increasingly urban creatures. According to figures from the United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects Report in 2018, the urbanization rate of the world’s population had grown from 33% in 1958 to 55% in 2018, with current trends expected to continue more or less stably until 2050, when the urbanization rate will reach 68%. If some 6.7 billion people are going to be living in cities, well, those cities will all have to meet their residents’ basic needs: needs like housing, transportation, sewerage and water.

The reliable, safe and equitable provision of water has long been a challenge for the world’s cities. This challenge is sure to be exacerbated by the growing urbanization in addition to the effects of global climate change, such as rising temperatures in cities like Karachi. Water management is a political topic, to be sure. But it is also a question of innovation and capability. Recent developments in technology—and data-driven urban management—generally referred to with the term “smart cities”—may well play a vital role in ensuring a safe water future for city-dwelling humans into the future.

Why data-driven smart cities are well-suited to water management

The term “smart cities” usually refers to metropoles that deploy initiatives using technology and data in order to enhance key outcomes like sustainability, livability and quality of life. Early on, the term often described the use of individual technologies like sensors and apps; now it involves cutting-edge tools like whole-city digital twins that allow planners to run tests, simulations and analyses using real-time urban data from multiple sources.

Many aspects of water management offer themselves particularly well to “smart” solutions. Cities often manage water centrally, enabling analytic perspectives and data-sharing from the top down: Singapore’s island-wide “Smart Water Grid,” for instance, analyzes sensor data from the whole city in real time to provide water quality alerts to operators. Innovations oriented toward connectivity and the Internet of Things (IoT) now have a track record of use in the context of waterworks, wastewater works, dams and distribution systems—areas where networked structures prove amenable to the use of sensors and where metrics for success (e.g. water quality, pressure or usage) are often both physical and quantifiable. “Smart” techniques have been applied for water management strategies from rainwater harvesting, desalination and graywater recycling and reuse through to metering and monitoring, demand management and irrigation systems.

Smart meters, whose adoption has been accelerating over recent years and decades, collect and transmit real-time data from end users in households and industry to online data loggers. Smart metering systems have shown major potential for improving the management of high-water demand by enhancing overall visibility and user transparency—sometimes by use of an app—while boosting overall distribution efficiency and detecting leaks and waste with greater accuracy. Increased smart metering has been linked to reductions in water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in a study of cities in the U.K., Australia, the U.S. and South Korea.

Using IoT and connected solutions, water utilities reap benefits such as better leak detection and maintenance, operations improvements grounded in advanced analytics, easier regulatory compliance, enhanced visibility into environmental impacts and water usage savings through the incorporation of weather data for forecasting and allocation models.

AI and digital twins are enabling new possibilities for water management

A new generation of “smart city” innovation—namely that of AI and digital twins—is also being brought to bear on urban water management. Cities as diverse as Singapore, Chattanooga and Aachen have proudly announced digital twins of themselves, virtual duplicates that enable varying degrees of analytics and simulation using real-time urban data. In Helsinki, the city’s digital twin was created with an emphasis on sustainability outcomes, supporting energy consumption and water use initiatives among other purposes.

In water management, digital twins have the power to unify data from a wide variety of sources: weather forecasting, IoT sensors, Earth satellite observations, historical data and potentially even local observations from citizen science, as the International Water Management Institute hopes to implement in its AI-driven Digital Twin for the Limpopo River Basin, with tools already created to digitize and validate biophysical citizen-submitted data for integration into the formal decision support system. Data on electricity prices can also be integrated alongside water-based data points like tank levels, flows, pressures and pump status to help reduce energy costs for water utilities.

In Valencia, water distribution is managed through a digital twin that leverages a hydraulic model fed by real-time and recorded data points of the pipes, pumps, tanks and valves, ultimately replicating the city’s 900-kilometer-long supply network to a high degree of accuracy. This digital twin enables the simulation of various scenarios, forecasts for future network behavior, enhanced decision-making and the development of contingency plans for emergencies.

Digital twins have also become a mainstream tool for urban resilience. They promise to bolster flood management by leveraging comprehensive citywide data from sensors alongside hydrological models and geographical data to run simulations and enable intelligent responses.

The city of Rotterdam is building a digital twin that models the impacts of climate change by combining meteorological data and hydrological models with infrastructure information. In doing so, it hopes to simulate flood scenarios and evaluate possible measures to mitigate their effects in a risk-free virtual space. Dresden, meanwhile, is working to produce an urban digital 3D twin that integrates environmental data from flood-prone areas into a publicly accessible online interactive city model.

New innovations are meeting new challenges

The application of “smart city” approaches to water management can pose both challenges and opportunities in terms of democracy, transparency and accessibility. Concerns about data privacy and cybersecurity will need to be taken seriously. Some cities—like Dresden—have made their virtual assets publicly available. Helsinki, for instance, offers open access to its digital models and data.

In New Zealand—a nation whose access to freshwater resources is challenged by seasonal pressures and environmental issues, including the effects of climate change—a number of “smart city” initiatives have been aimed at the problem of water management. One of them has proven a major success. Safeswim, founded by the city of Auckland in 2017, is an online data-driven solution for monitoring and predicting water quality that brings together real-time modeling, AI, big data analytics and visualization to help users decide where (and if) to swim in recreational waters.

This tool—in addition to providing a clear benefit to local citizens—has also been used to draw attention to ongoing problems with aging infrastructure and water pollution. The program’s ultimate result has been increased awareness of water quality issues and a higher willingness to pay via council rates for these issues’ remediation: a win for public trust and transparency.