Place Intelligence: Why Most Developers Get It Wrong

Songdo, built on reclaimed land outside Incheon and often described as the world’s first smart city, was fitted with sensors feeding real-time data on traffic, waste and security. Estimates of its cost range from around USD 20 billion to USD 40 billion, depending on what is counted. The systems ran. Yet population growth in its early years fell well short of projections, and core systems such as in-home telepresence were overtaken by mobile-first tools before they could earn their place. The investment decisions had started from the technology available, and the lives the place was meant to hold came second.

Songdo is one example of a wider pattern. Developments led by information and communications technology (ICT) companies have run into serious setbacks, and some have been cancelled outright. The recurring issue is technology deployed ahead of, or instead of, a clear answer to what residents need from the place.

In the GCC the stakes are higher, because the scale of investment is larger and the pace is faster than almost anywhere else.

The scale of the commitment

Knight Frank’s tracker puts contract awards across Saudi Arabia’s giga-projects at USD 196 billion in 2025, up 20% on the previous year and across the western seaboard's 17 projects, including Red Sea Global and Qiddiya Coast, more than 382,500 new homes are planned by 2030. Every one of those homes, and the public realm around it, carries a technology decision.

The consumer end of the market is growing too. Residential smart home systems across the GCC were estimated at USD 2.69 billion in 2024 and are forecast to reach USD 6.72 billion by 2033. That figure covers the home alone. It leaves out the public realm infrastructure, community management platforms and building systems a master development depends on.

Across a single portfolio of 14 developments, the hardware cost of place intelligence infrastructure ranged from AED 3.9 billion for core systems to AED 26.8 billion at full scope and the highest tier. Where each development sat in that range depended on the experience it had promised its residents.

The question that changes the answer

GCC developers are building communities for people who are choosing to move here, stay here and raise families here. Dubai’s residency data shows the shift: the emirate’s residency authority issued 158,000 golden visas in 2023, against 47,150 in 2021, and a further 66,000 in the first half of 2026. Long-term residents change what a place needs to do for the people in it.

A master developer with affordable housing, mid-market communities, premium residences and ultra-luxury villas is making four distinct promises to four distinct resident profiles. The technology logic that serves one of those profiles misserves another. Applying a uniform stack across a differentiated portfolio is a misallocation that gets locked into the built environment before handover, and it is difficult and costly to correct afterwards.

Most technology programmes begin by asking what systems are available. The question that should come first is what experience this development has promised its residents, and what technology, at what level of investment, is needed to deliver it.

That question changes everything downstream: which systems are core and which are optional, what coverage logic applies by asset type, what the cost model looks like at portfolio scale, and what the board is actually approving when it signs off the capital programme.

What the GCC context demands

Dubai and Abu Dhabi rank sixth and tenth of 148 cities in the IMD Smart City Index 2026, the only cities in the Middle East and North Africa in the global top ten. The index relies heavily on residents’ own assessments of services and infrastructure, which puts lived experience at the centre of the measure. Abu Dhabi now tracks service completion at district level, and developers in both cities are increasingly read against the same variables.

Technology installed without reference to residents’ daily experience produces data that no one uses and liveability scores that do not move. Technology that starts from the experience the development has promised produces systems that serve residents and data that supports operational improvement over time.

Getting place intelligence right in the GCC is not a technology question. It is an experience question that technology gets to answer.