Smart Cities Failed. Platform Cities Won’t
The ERP Illusion and the Rise of the Platform City
There’s a quiet deception playing out across city governments around the world. It is one that has shaped budgets, locked in vendor power, and limited the way we think about what a digital city actually is.
For decades, enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) have occupied the center of the local government technology universe. Dominant vendors have successfully positioned themselves as the core infrastructure of councils. And to a degree, they are.
Rates, revenue, finance, payroll, and property systems matter. They’re foundational. But a quiet myth has taken root. That these systems represent the totality of the digital city. That if they’re functioning, the city is functioning.
In truth, these systems often consume up to 80% of the technology budget, while covering as little as 20% of what a city or town actually does.
The lived experience of the city, from the eyes of a resident, a business owner, or a visitor, interacts with dozens of other systems every day. They log service requests through Snap Send Solve. They check traffic updates, follow local alerts, engage with tourism websites, consult planning portals, participate in community consultation on platforms like Bang the Table. They pay for parking, access events, view council meetings, sign up for childcare, receive flood notifications, or register for emergency housing assistance. That is, they interact with the city, as a service. These are not edge cases or side features. They are the city, in digital form. But they’re almost never part of the ERP.
The deeper problem is that each of these systems is typically managed in a different department, procured under a different contract, governed under a different logic. Some are owned, some leased, some integrated by necessity. The result is fragmentation disguised as progress.
When executives ask for a view of operations across their council, there often isn’t one. What they get instead are disconnected spreadsheets, dashboards that don’t talk to each other, and a dependency on institutional memory to connect the dots.
This is the heart of the City-as-a-Service (CaaS) challenge.
The promise of CaaS is not about any one system. It’s about thinking of the city as an interconnected ecosystem. An organic whole where services, stakeholders, platforms, people, devices, and infrastructure all operate in relationship to one another.
In this framing, the real gold standard isn’t whether a system performs, but whether it interacts. It’s not just about uptime or compliance or SLAs; it’s about context. How does this service influence the others? What new value is created when data flows between systems? What do we see when we look at the city in motion, not in silos?
This view challenges everything about how councils have traditionally approached technology. It suggests that digital platforms are no longer just operational tools. They are civic infrastructure.
They should be planned for, maintained, governed, and funded as such. Just as we invest in roads, water systems, and waste management, we must now invest in service orchestration, integration layers, and real-time visibility across digital assets. These are the pipes and pathways of the modern city.
And critically, the audience for this isn’t the Head of IT or the Finance Manager. The CFO doesn't care about tourism data. The IT Manager can’t consolidate stakeholder sentiment. The Facilities team isn’t thinking about digital mobility.
The real customer for this shift is the mayor’s office, the CEO, the executive team. Because this isn’t about systems. It’s about oversight. It’s about accountability, transparency, responsiveness, and the ability to lead from insight, not guesswork.
Selling individual systems to functional heads may have worked when each service stood alone. But in today’s world, where mobility, safety, community sentiment, customer service, emergency management, and economic development all intertwine, we need leaders who see the whole and who demand a platform that mirrors the complexity and connectivity of the city itself.
This is where the “Smart City” vision faltered.
The Smart City movement began with genuine intent. To use technology to improve urban life. And I still subscribe to that vision. But somewhere along the way, the narrative lost its coherence and sliced into point solutions. Smart parking. Smart lighting. Smart bins. Each with their own app, their own dashboard, and their own disconnected data sets.
Instead of unifying the city, Smart City thinking allowed fragmentation to accelerate under the illusion of innovation. The result was a patchwork. More tech, but not more clarity.
The idea was always about creating more connected, responsive, and inclusive cities. That part remains true and necessary. But the way it’s been executed, through a focus on smart things instead of smart systems, has weakened the impact.
It’s time to reclaim the intent and rebuild the architecture around integration, not innovation theatre.
That’s why we need a new frame: Platform City.
Platform City doesn’t mean every service is centralised, but it does mean everything is connectable. It treats the city as a dynamic digital organism, where each function, from mobility, engagement, safety, and customer service, to resilience, is a system within a system. Governed independently, yes, but designed to interoperate.
The move from Smart to Platform is more than semantic. It’s a shift in control from vendor-led product conversations to city-led platform governance. It prioritises the executive’s need for a clear, real-time view of operations, not just departmental efficiency. It demands that vendors stop selling what they have and start aligning to what the city needs.
Platform City is not a technology play. It’s a leadership model. And the cities that adopt it will finally move from digital potential to real civic intelligence.