Why this platform exists
Evidence baseLoading official report dataset…
ASEAN Smart Cities Network · Demonstrations
Innovation-as-a-Service
Flood intelligence in the field, at the operations desk, and on the map. Data made useful for cities.
Flood intelligence in the field
Open video ↗A tablet-based flood dashboard demonstrated on a flooded street, connecting conditions on the ground with mapped data.
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Across the region
All news ↗Loading regional headlines…
ASCN 2026 · 9th Annual Meeting · 20 July
What they actually did
The Philippines chaired. Twenty-five cities joined. Three new members. Japan, Korea, UN-Habitat, and a finance pilot all presented. Draft record, not yet adopted.
ASEAN Smart Cities Network
38 cities. 134 projects. How is it performing?
134 projects tracked since 2018. Not one public platform has asked how the network is performing against its own goals. This one does.
ASCN Operational Intelligence · Applied Digital Twins
From static reports to living cities: 5 operational digital twins
What is an urban digital twin? Rather than a static PDF report or a conventional map, an urban digital twin connects a city’s 3D spatial geometry with live sensor feeds, weather models, telemetry, and civic infrastructure. It enables city operators, emergency teams, and citizens to track real-time conditions — from canal gates and rainfall radar to air quality and traffic — as they unfold on the ground. Explore the live digital twins built for ASEAN member cities below:
Live · Flood Edition
Bangkok · Thailand
BKKX Live Atlas
432,000+ 3D buildings, canal gates, CCTV streams, rainfall radar, and real-time flood emergency telemetry.
atlas.nonarkara.org ↗
Live · 3D Blocks
Jakarta · Indonesia
JKTX Blok demi Blok
3D urban mesh, BMKG CAP disaster alerts, air quality indices, Himawari satellite clouds, and block-level flood screening.
jakarta.nonarkara.org ↗
Live · Simulation
Ho Chi Minh City · Viet Nam
HCMC Block by Block
Saigon River drainage corridors, 3D skyline geometry, recurring flood screening, satellite layers, and urban runoff models.
hcmc.nonarkara.org ↗
Live · Basin Telemetry
Kuching · Malaysia
Greater Kuching Telemetry
River telemetry (Buso, Siniawan, Kampung Git), drainage catchment models, and MET Malaysia weather warnings.
kuching.nonarkara.org ↗
Live · War Room
Chiang Mai · Thailand
CNX OPS War Room
Ping River telemetry, PM2.5 air sensors, NASA FIRMS fire hotspot detection, CCTV network, and 3D urban relief.
cnx.nonarkara.org ↗ASEAN Smart Cities Network · Applied Technology
Innovation-as-a-Service
Live systems, not a roadmap. Two national watches, three country dashboards, seven ASCN city dashboards — each one built inside a city, on data the city already had.
Active Innovation Sandbox
All links below are live and public. No login, no request form.
What this actually is
Not a product. A method.
Innovation-as-a-Service sits inside a city agency and builds the one screen that speeds up the one decision that actually gets made — on data the city already has, with no new hardware, in two weeks.
- PurposefulOne problem that matters to real people.
- PracticalBuild on what the city already owns.
- Prove itPilot and proof of concept before any large contract.
- PeopleIncentives right, so the users want it.
One screen. One decision. Two weeks.
01
Featured · National watches
FloodDash and Airdash
The two systems the rest of the portfolio is built on. Both are live, free, and run on public data that already refreshes on its own.
flood.nonarkara.org
FloodDash — Thailand Flood Watch เฝ้าระวังน้ำท่วมประเทศไทย
Every Thai province on one flood picture. Nine public sources — DDPM, Hydro-Informatics Institute, the Royal Irrigation Department, the Meteorological Department and the Pollution Control Department — streamed and refreshed every 3 to 60 minutes.
It is not more sensors. It is the data, cooked: ingest, normalise, persist, score, explain. A resident opens My Area and sees the latest evidence, why it matters, and shelters to confirm with the local authority. Roughly 70,000 pieces of customised information cover every village in Thailand.
- 9 public sources, one picture
- 3–60 min refresh window
- 70,000 village-level records
- 1784 official disaster hotline
air.nonarkara.org
AirDash — Your lungs today ปอดของคุณวันนี้
A 24/7 air-quality and PM2.5 watch that ranks every province in the country on the same public data, so a number in Udon Thani can be compared honestly with a number in Bangkok.
Same discipline as FloodDash: one metric, one method, every province, no exceptions. What you see is what the public sources say, with a three-day forecast so the trend is visible before the number turns.
- 24/7 public-data watch
- 77 provinces, one ranking
- 3-day forward forecast
- PM2.5 as the headline metric
02
Country dashboards
Whole countries, read at a glance
The same question asked of a nation instead of a ward: what is happening, how bad is it, and who is affected.
malaysia.nonarkara.org
Malaysia
River gauges, MET warnings and city signals in one national view — the God Mode pattern applied to a whole country.
Open ↗carbon.nonarkara.org
Forest Carbon คาบอนนะ
Satellite-based carbon stock, forest loss, fire and emissions for any province — or any area you draw on the map — with sources and stated uncertainty.
Open ↗globalmonitor.nonarkara.org
GlobeWatch
A planetary comparative and macro intelligence console — the comparative view, when a city decision is really a regional one.
Open ↗03
ASCN member cities
City dashboards across the network
The City Hub pattern: give it a city name and it maps the city and absorbs whatever data exists. Seven ASCN cities, each with its own operational surface.
phuket.nonarkara.org
Phuket
Operations surface for the city that pairs with Las Vegas under the US–ASEAN Smart Cities Partnership.
Open ↗chonburi.nonarkara.org
Chonburi CTM-01
Chonburi Town Center — a town-centre operations console built as a first screen, not a finished product.
Open ↗cnx.nonarkara.org
Chiang Mai
Operations war room for Chiang Mai, the northern city where the Axiom lab is co-founded with Chiang Mai University.
Open ↗atlas.nonarkara.org
Bangkok BKKx 3D Atlas
A browser model of Bangkok, block by block — 432,077 real OpenStreetMap buildings, terrain, air quality, rain radar, land prices, rail and canals.
Open ↗jakarta.nonarkara.org
Jakarta
City atlas for Indonesia’s capital, built on the same hub that generalises to any ASCN city.
Open ↗hcmc.nonarkara.org
Ho Chi Minh City
City atlas for Vietnam’s largest metropolis — the Mekong delta’s decision surface.
Open ↗kuching.nonarkara.org
Kuching
City atlas for Greater Kuching, Sarawak — the east Malaysia surface on the same stack.
Open ↗04
Operational fieldwork & command dashboards
Demonstrations in action
From floodwater on street level to multi-screen municipal operations rooms and predictive models.
Field demonstration
Flood intelligence in the field
A ruggedized tablet-based dashboard operated on flooded streets, correlating physical water marks with live sensor telemetry.
Watch field recording ↗
Operations desk
City operations on one screen
Telemetry layers, live CCTV camera grids, and municipal GIS integrated into unified situation dashboards for emergency war rooms.
Watch operations recording ↗
Maps & modelling
From flood data to decisions
High-resolution terrain elevation masks, 3D flood simulations, and drainage bottleneck analytics informing municipal infrastructure investments.
Watch modelling walkthrough ↗05
Public platforms
Open to any city that asks
The lab these dashboards are built in, the browser-based computer-vision workbench, and the regional liveability index.
axiom.nonarkara.org
Axiom
Smart-city dashboards and GovTech systems for governments. 66 systems across five countries, 41 of them in production, drawing on more than 247 public data sources.
Open ↗vision.nonarkara.org
Vision — how a computer sees คอมพิวเตอร์มองเห็นอย่างไร
A public classroom and operational workbench for computer vision on Thailand’s open traffic and municipal CCTV. Neural inference runs in the client browser — no camera video leaves the city.
Open ↗slic.nonarkara.org
SLIC Liveability Index
Regional benchmarking across five liveability pillars — in which mayors decide what livability means, rather than receive it.
Open ↗06
Provenance
Where this came from
None of the rows above began as a dashboard. The method behind them was not designed in a summit working group — it came out of two hackathons and one week standing in front of a wall of screens in Taipei.
-
2020 · Expo 2020, Dubai
Hydrogence
A flood-warning platform built by Thai practitioners that won on the world stage at the Hackathon at Expo 2020. The first version of the argument this page makes: a city should not need to buy software in order to see a flood coming.
Techsauce ↗ depa Thailand ↗ -
2023 · 24 September, Taipei
Refill City
A Team of Excellence in the Presidential Hackathon International Track, awarded by the President of Taiwan. Free clean drinking water run by municipalities under their own rules — Nakhon Si Thammarat, then Rangsit, then Sukhothai Thani — and the depa Smart Living Excellence award in 2026. This is where the 4Ps above come from: a prototype, a pilot, then the boring work of changing the rules.
The Kommon ↗ -
2023 · 25 September, Taipei
The Taipei IOC
The same week: the Taipei Intelligent Operation Center, and a city dashboard released open-source under AGPL-3.0. A whole city on one screen, used by the people who decide to spend the money. That is where every dashboard on this page comes from.
Taipei City Dashboard ↗
Stolen, improved and credited: the ideas came from Taipei, the adaptation is ours, and the credit is in the source code. The network is ten years old. This method is three.
Partner With Us
Have an urban dataset or challenge?
ASCN Innovation-as-a-Service is an open testbed built by ASEAN city practitioners. We help member cities turn static datasets into live operational tools.
Contact ASCN Team ↗The public record · 28 April 2018 → 2026
Ten years, counted
ASCN turns ten this year. This page counts what was committed to it, what it holds, and what can be shown to have reached a citizen — separating money announced from money moved, and activity held from outcome delivered.
Method
Every figure below carries its source and its evidentiary status. Committed is not disbursed. An output is not an outcome.
The first finding is the accounting
Before you can ask whether ASCN worked, you have to ask what ASCN spent. After ten years, that question cannot be answered from the public record — not because the money did not move, but because nobody is obliged to say.
USD 0
Held centrally by ASCN
ASCN is a coordinating platform, not a funding pool. It coordinates, it does not finance. Every figure below is money that flows around the network, through bilateral programmes, trust funds and development banks.
0
Systems tracking total flows
The network has no systematic tracking of total investment flows. There is no published ASCN-wide figure for money committed, disbursed or absorbed in eight years of M&E cycles — because the network does not collect one.
13%
Of tracked projects completed
134 projects tracked in the September 2025 M&E cycle. 18 completed. 108 still ongoing. A project counted as "ongoing" in year five has not delivered, and the report does not say how long it has been ongoing.
Membership and project counts are quoted here at their stated cut-offs, which differ by source: 35 cities at 30 September 2025 (M&E 2025), 38 at January 2026 (official ASCN roster, after Dili joined with Timor-Leste's accession).
00
The founding instruments · 2018–2019
The instrument that would have measured this never arrived on time
Before the count of projects, the count that matters is the count of the machinery built to evaluate them. The founding documents tell a precise story about why seven years of this network went unmeasured.
Apr 2018
Concept Note
Establishes ASCN as a Singapore proposal. Scope capped at "up to three cities from each AMS". 26 pilot cities listed as of 23 March 2018. No project target. No funding total. No deadline beyond the 2025 planning horizon.
Jul 2018
26 Smart City Action Plans
Each city submits a SCAP with four parts, including exactly two priority projects. That is the entire founding portfolio: 26 cities × 2 projects = 52 projects. Cities were to report status annually to the Secretariat; no such consolidated report has been found.
Aug 2019
Terms of Reference adopted
One year in, ASCN has still 26 cities. The Terms of Reference mandate periodic project evaluation under an M&E Framework — which is recorded in the same report as not yet finished, and deferred to 2020.
2020 →
The accountability gap
The instrument that would have made the network measurable against its own goals slipped past the year it was needed. Every cycle since has counted projects instead — because that is what the framework was built to do.
Sources: ASCN Concept Note (2018), Consolidated SCAPs (as of 8 July 2018), ASCN 2019 Annual Meeting Report. Note that three files in the source library — 09, 13 and 14 — are the same 2019 report in different revisions, not three independent sources. One further document in the library, a Thai Cabinet submission, is an image-only scan with no extractable text and could not be cited.
0
The only self-reported performance series
Projects accumulate faster than they finish
Strip out the frameworks and the toolkits and ASCN reports one thing about itself in every cycle: how many projects exist, and what share is finished. Five data points, four reports, one direction.
| Cycle | Projects | Ongoing | Completed | Completion rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 baseline stated in 2022 report | 65 | — | — | — |
| 2022 cut-off 21 Sep | 77 | 75.3% | 2.9% | 2.9% |
| 2023 cut-off 14 Aug | 86 | 77.9% | 2.3% | 2.3% |
| 2024 cut-off 25 Sep | 108 | 81 | 11 | 10.2% |
| 2025 cut-off 30 Sep | 134 | 108 | 18 | 13.0% |
The portfolio more than doubled in four years — 65 to 134 projects, a 106% increase. The completion rate improved from 2.9% to 13%, which is the strongest positive trend in the entire record, and it is still true that eight in ten projects tracked in 2025 have not finished.
Both facts are real. The second is the one that matters to a resident, and it is the one ASCN has never put on a slide.
The 2022 and 2023 reports state no reporting period at all; the 2024 and 2025 reports state one. Cut-offs drift from mid-August to late September, so the four cycles are not a perfectly uniform annual series. The 2025 figure of 134 is verifiable twice within a single document: stated in prose, and reconcilable from 116 appendix-A items plus 18 appendix-B items.
A
Ledger · Funding
What was committed to the network's orbit
Partner programmes, not ASCN grants. The status column is the point: these are envelope figures announced at partnership level, and the public record does not resolve how much reached an ASCN city.
| Partner / programme | Announced | Coverage as stated | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Japan — SmartJAMP JBIC loans + JOIN equity | JPY 250B~USD 2.4B | 26 ASCN cities, 10 sectors | Announced |
| Australia — AASCTF ADB-managed, 2019–2024 | AUD 20M~USD 14M | 24 cities, 8 countries | Announced |
| China — Smart City Cooperation Leaders' Statement 2019 | — | 8 Chinese cities paired with 26 ASCN cities | Undisclosed |
| Korea — ASPP ASEAN-Korea Cooperation Fund | Not stated | Regional · training and Master's scholarships | Undisclosed |
| United States — USASCP / USTDA | Multiple grants | Davao, Da Nang, Ho Chi Minh City | Announced |
| EU — Smart Green ASEAN Cities UNCDF-implemented, 2014–2020 | EUR 200M+ | Regional | Announced |
| ADB — ASEAN Catalytic Green Finance Facility | USD 300M+ USD 1.9B co-financing | ~30 projects in pipeline | Pipeline, not disbursed |
Two things are worth being precise about. First, none of the four M&E cycles attaches a single currency amount to anything: the reports name ADB, JICA, USTDA, AASCTF, SmartJAMP, Aus4ASEAN, KOICA and BMBF as funders, and never state what any of them paid. The envelope figures above come from partner programme documentation, not from ASCN's own monitoring. Second, no source itemises what any envelope paid for, per city, per project. Individual ASCN projects in the tracker range from USD 100K to USD 6.7B, and the gap between those two ends is where both the network's coordinating role and its accounting vacuum sit.
B
Ledger · Travel & events
Meetings are counted. Who paid for them is not.
Annual meetings, working groups and high-level meetings are public. The cost, the delegation size and the funder for any of them are not — which is what makes sponsored travel by developed-country partners invisible rather than absent.
Rule, 2019
The host country pays
The Terms of Reference adopted in 2019 are explicit: "the hosting of the Meetings and the cost of organising shall be borne by the host country." The written rule is not that donor governments fly officials around — it is that each host funds its own year.
USD 0
Cost of the network itself
No budget line, staff number or secondment figure appears in any founding, chairmanship or M&E document. This is a structural blank, not a search failure. Ten years of ASEAN official time have been spent, and none of it is priced anywhere.
0
Participants, for any event, in any year
No M&E cycle states an attendance figure for a single meeting. Workshops, high-level meetings, showcases, Smart City professional programmes, MoU signing trips and business-matching programmes are all named as recurring activity. Not one of them is counted.
First-hand disclosure · one named witness
The platform's own author has attended ASCN workshops, high-level meetings, showcases, Smart City professional programmes, MoU signing trips and business-matching programmes on a repeated basis over seven years, and estimates travelling more than 200,000 miles in the process.
This is offered as a single witness statement, not as a network statistic, and no number above is derived from it. It is included because it makes the disclosure problem concrete: the network's most frequent beneficiary is a person who can produce his own travel log, while the network itself cannot produce a single participant number for anything it has organised.
The honest summary is neither "officials are bought" nor "the travel is unremarkable". It is that a decade of international convening has run on rotating national budgets and donor-funded programmes, and has never once been counted. A network answerable to member-state taxpayers should be able to state, in one line, how many people it moved and at whose cost.
C
Ledger · Agreements & communications
The most productive output, by volume
The reviewed archive is dominated by statements, reaffirmations and partnership announcements. These are real outputs. They are also the easiest output to produce, and the one least connected to a citizen's morning.
3
Memoranda of understanding, in four cycles
Three MoUs are named across the 2022–2025 reports, all in 2023, and all at city level: Makassar Puskesmas with two Indonesian medical partners, and the Siem Reap Tourism Club with a Japanese firm. No network-level MoU, joint declaration or communiqué is named in any cycle.
0
Peer-review exercises ever run
The 2022 report recommends that peer review and expert guidance could give cities opportunities. The 2024 and 2025 reports record no such exercise being conducted. A network that reviews its cities' plans only in its own documents does not review them.
2 of 27
Independent scrutiny in the reviewed archive
Two of 27 curated records are independent critique: a commentary on Makatizen and smart-city governance, and the CIDOB analysis of Singapore's leadership role — the most important auditing document in the whole record, and not an ASCN publication.
Counts describe this archive, a growing research file and not a census of all ASCN activity. They are the ratio of documented scrutiny to documented output — not a verdict on the whole network.
D
Ledger · Training & courses
People were trained. The record stops there.
Training is the network's most human output and the best documented — which is exactly why its blind spot is worth naming: the archive reports attendance, and almost never reports what a graduate then did.
144 + 40
ASPP: trained and enrolled
The ASEAN Smart City Professional Programme with Seoul National University, funded by the ASEAN-Korea Cooperation Fund, reports 144 local government representatives through short-term training and 40 more mid-degree. It is the network's most credible human output and its most precisely counted.
0
Reported downstream outcomes
Across the 2024 and 2025 cycles the programme reports attendance and enrolment only. No graduate is tracked to a system they commissioned, a policy they changed, or a budget they moved. The conversion from trained to deployed is the one metric the network does not publish.
This is the cheapest thing to fix and the most useful. A network that tracked where 184 trained officials went would have a performance story its own reports currently cannot tell — and it is a stronger answer to critics than any toolkit ever published.
?
The founding question
Who was the network built for?
ASCN was established in Singapore in April 2018, as a priority deliverable of that year's ASEAN Chairmanship. Its founders stated the rationale in ASEAN-wide terms — 90 million more people expected to urbanise by 2030, and middleweight cities of 200,000 to 2 million expected to drive 40% of regional growth. On the documents, this was framed as a shared regional problem, not a Singaporean one. The instrument built to solve it, however, carries a different signature.
What the design does reveal
Scope was capped at "up to three cities from each AMS". Decisions are by consensus. Meetings are funded by the host. There is no budget, no staff line, and no working group named in any founding document. Every one of those choices is cheap for a city-state with a permanent secretariat, a consolidated budget and a domestic mandate — and expensive, or impossible, for a country still building those things.
In year one the network added no cities at all: 26 at founding, still 26 at the end of 2019. A body created to scale cities did not scale in its first year.
What the evidence does not establish
It does not establish that Singapore's own density motivated the initiative — the founding documents name Singapore as a co-beneficiary, not the driver. Independent researchers do read the network critically: CIDOB examines Singapore's city diplomacy and commercial interests in its December 2025 analysis, and Kong & Woods (2021) describe a technocratic regionalism in which Singapore's urban model circulates as neutral regional knowledge.
CIDOB / Melinda Martinus, Dec 2025 ↗The one asymmetry the sources do support is urban density — and it needs to be stated precisely, because the usual version of the claim is wrong.
Member stateUrban share of population
Singapore100.0%
Malaysia76.4%
Brunei74.8%
Thailand60.9%
Indonesia58.1%
Philippines55.1%
Cambodia40.6%
Laos38.8%
Vietnam38.1%
Myanmar30.4%
Timor-Leste28.6%
Timor-Leste joined ASEAN in 2025, becoming ASCN's 11th member state.
Singapore is the only fully urbanised state in the network: every resident lives in a city, and no other member reaches 80%. The median ASEAN member sits near 40% — below half. A network designed by a state where urban governance is national governance is being asked to serve a region where it is not. That asymmetry is real, and it is worth naming precisely enough that it survives a reader who checks the sources. The looser claim — that Singapore is the only urbanised ASEAN state — is not supportable, because Malaysia and Brunei both clear 70%.
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS, 2023. Malaysia's 76.4% sits alongside 58% forest cover, which looks contradictory until you read the definition: each country classifies a settlement as urban on its own national rule, and Malaysia's census counts a place of 2,000 or more residents where at least half the workforce is in non-agricultural work — so a small township ringed by forest counts. The numbers above are not measured on a common basis, which is itself a reason to treat any "only one urbanised state" comparison as unsettled.
The open question is narrower and more answerable: ten years of apparatus later, did the network move practice between cities, or only document it? That has never been tested with a shared dataset. This platform exists to build one.
Meanwhile, in the gap
While the apparatus above ran its cycles, one practitioner inside the network kept shipping. Fifteen systems are live right now — two national watches, three country dashboards, seven ASCN city dashboards and three public platforms — built outside the network's own machinery, in about three years, on public data only.
See what that produced ↗ASEAN Smart Cities Network · Evidence review
ASCN in the public record
What was promised, what was delivered, and what still needs evidence.
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What the coverage establishes
Counts describe this archive, not all ASCN activity. A source can establish an output without demonstrating an outcome.
Coverage over time
Records by publication year, or context year when the publication date is unknown. Missing coverage is not inactivity.
Against ASCN's three objectives
Questions the record leaves open
City evidence gaps
Only explicit city-specific evidence counts here. Hosting a regional meeting does not count as local project delivery. Project rows come from the latest available official cycle; absent rows are not zero projects.
| City | Evidence records | Delivery records | Outcome records | Project rows |
|---|
Historical evidence ledger
Source data ↓ASCN discovery leads
Unreviewed search matches, excluded from performance findings. Index dates may differ from publication dates. Coverage includes old and new articles, research and announcements; duplicate reporting may remain.
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ASEAN · City development
Regional news
Public services, transport, infrastructure, and the technology shaping Southeast Asia’s cities.
Filters
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Sources, method and coverage limits
Overview · 9th Annual Meeting
What they actually did
On 20 July 2026 the ASEAN Smart Cities Network met on a video call. The Philippines ran it. Twenty-five cities were on the line. Draft record, 13 August 2026. Not yet adopted.
The chair was Marlo L. Iringan, Undersecretary for Local Government at the Philippines’ Department of the Interior and Local Government. He read opening remarks from Interior Secretary Juanito Victor C. Remulla: cities are where a policy becomes a service someone can use. Technology is a tool, not the destination. The Philippines wants a joint statement that pushes Sustainable Development Goal 11 — sustainable cities and communities — by 2030, and that turns the 2026–2035 action plan into work.
In the room, on camera: national representatives from Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Myanmar. Officials standing in for Lao PDR, Singapore, Thailand, Viet Nam, and Timor-Leste. City officers from 25 member cities. The ASEAN Secretariat. Japan’s land ministry, Korea’s land ministry, UN-Habitat, and Evercity came to present.
Three cities had joined since last September: Denpasar and Semarang from Indonesia, and Dili from Timor-Leste. All three are included in this platform’s 38-city roster, following the official membership list as of January 2026. Project totals still follow the September 2025 monitoring cycle.
Malaysia, last year’s chair, recapped 2025. A sustainable-urbanisation forum in Kuala Lumpur in August. The eighth annual meeting, an expert talk, an exhibition, and site visits in September. Adoption of the ASEAN Smart Cities Action Plan for 2026–2035. Another round of the Korea-funded professional programme at Seoul National University, including master’s scholarships.
This year’s work
The Philippines named three things it wants done in 2026.
First, that joint statement on SDG 11. The title changed after comments. Members were asked to send further comments or to agree by 31 July 2026. If nobody objects, the text stands. This draft is dated 13 August, after that date. The record does not say whether the statement has been adopted.
Second, Smart City Talks the next day, 21 July, also on a video call: cities swapping what actually worked, under the same 2030 theme.
Third, a second ASEAN Sustainable Urbanisation Report, paid for through Australia’s Aus4ASEAN Futures Initiative. An expert group already met on 7 July to check the aims, talk through regional trends, and start country profiles.
The network’s own rulebook is being rewritten to catch up with facts on the ground. Timor-Leste is now the 11th ASEAN member. Reporting is moving from the Joint Consultative Meeting to the Committee of Permanent Representatives. The 2026–2035 action plan and the 2045 community vision have to be written in. Singapore already sent comments. Everyone else was asked to send theirs by 31 July.
The Secretariat also tabled a spreadsheet for tracking the 2026–2035 action plan — a living document. Comments by the same date.
Twenty-five cities reported on their local plans. Two points landed. A smart city is not the city with the most machines. It is the city that uses them to run services and make life better. And flood work is shifting from reacting after the water comes to forecasting before it does.
Indonesia invited everyone to a waste-to-energy forum in Jakarta, 11–13 August 2026, inside its ninth international smart city expo. Mexico City will host the World Cities Summit Mayors Forum in September 2027. Mexico City won the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize in 2024.
The 2026 monitoring report goes to ASEAN’s Coordinating Council in early November. It has to be finished in the first week of October. Members were asked to send their numbers by 14 August. The public version will not include the full project-by-project matrix. That is how it has been done before.
Japan
Japan’s land ministry listed five city projects for 2025–2026: modular housing in Phnom Penh; camera-based river monitoring in Jakarta; satellite flood monitoring in Makassar; a tourism travel platform in Manila; and a real-time crisis information platform in Timor-Leste.
Region-wide, Japan has started a transit-oriented development guidebook for ASEAN with Nikken Sekkei, Nikken Sekkei Research Institute, and Pacific Consultants. The point is a guide to building around stations that fits ASEAN legal, social, and economic conditions, and a city’s own history. It is meant for government officials, railway operators, developers, and academics.
Korea
Korea’s K-City Network has run 67 projects in 30 countries since 2020. This year it is in six ASEAN projects, including on-demand transport in Ho Chi Minh City and a city platform in Bandar Seri Begawan.
Korea is now talking about “AI cities”: using data from transport, safety, welfare, administration, and energy to predict problems and tailor services, with people still in charge. It is preparing AI-specialised pilots in both existing and new urban areas. That is Korea’s direction. It is not an ASCN decision.
Seoul National University floated a Phase 2 of the professional programme: less data-planning for working-level staff, more AI policy for working-level staff and senior decision-makers. A proposal. Not a vote.
Money, training, a ministerial idea
Evercity, funded through the ASEAN–Russia dialogue fund, wants to test a digital outcome bond in the region — green and climate finance that, in this design, is issued digitally and reported at project level. They are scoring which ASEAN countries are ready for that kind of instrument. Next they will come back to this network to check the scores and look for a pilot city.
UN-Habitat, under the Philippines’ ASEAN year, is running the second phase of the sustainable urbanisation project. Leadership training ran from March to July and is due to finish in October. Diagnostic reports for new cities are done; technical proposals are due in September. Phase 1 assistance is finished, with outputs also due in September. The second urbanisation report’s first draft is due in August. UN-Habitat wants extra help, inside the same budget, to turn those city proposals into something that can actually be built. They will come back through the Secretariat with the details.
Malaysia proposed lifting the network to ministerial level: an ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Smart and Sustainable Cities. The paper came out in December 2025. Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand have already commented. Indonesia and the Philippines said they support it. Indonesia’s caveat: ministers could meet every two years; the current annual meeting of national and city officials should stay as the working body, because that is where city plans get done. Malaysia will send a revised paper. No decision yet.
Singapore takes the chair in 2027. Date and place of the tenth meeting: later.
Homework
The meeting left a list. Deadlines are what the meeting set. This draft does not say what has been sent in since.
- Joint statement on SDG 11Comments or agreement by 31 July 2026 · members
- Network rulebookComments by 31 July 2026 · members and the Secretariat
- Action-plan tracking sheetComments by 31 July 2026 · members
- Project partnerships listUpdates by 31 July 2026 · members and the Secretariat
- Monitoring numbersWorksheet by 14 August 2026 · members and the Secretariat
- Digital-finance readinessCome back to the network · Evercity
- Extra help on city proposalsCome back to the network · UN-Habitat
- Ministerial-level paperRevised proposal · Malaysia
- Tenth annual meetingDate and programme · Singapore
Source Draft summary record of the 9th ASCN Annual Meeting, 13 August 2026. Not yet adopted. Photo captions describe slides and screens from the call; those details are not in the written record. This page is not an official ASEAN publication.
History
From 26 pilot cities to a regional network
Established at the 32nd ASEAN Summit in April 2018, the network has grown across eight chair years and five rounds of expansion.
The rotating chair & the persistent shepherd
Nine years of leadership — and the continuity role built to survive the annual hand-off
The network in the field
Seven years of meetings, partnerships, and knowledge exchange
Annual meetings
The ASCN Annual Meeting cycle
Member Cities
38 cities, 11 countries — and what each is building
Projects
The smart-city project portfolio
Focus-area mix
latest cycleImplementation status
Top cities by project load
filteredProject evidence table
| City | Country | Project | Focus | Status |
|---|
Flagship investments
Largest documented projects by investment
Framework & By-laws
The ASEAN Smart Cities Framework
Six focus areas
Where the work is concentrated
Governance
How the network is run
Capacity building
How the network trains the people who run the cities
Partnerships & Finance
A multi-stakeholder ecosystem
ASCN coordinates rather than funds. Bilateral partners, multilateral banks, and blended finance carry the projects.
Dialogue partners
Major bilateral programmes
Multilateral partners
Financing landscape
Programme networks
Bilateral smart city cooperation with ASCN
Resource · Aus4ASEAN Futures
ASEAN Smart City Financing Toolkit
Event · Jakarta · 26–27 November 2024
Advancing Smart Cities across ASEAN and Beyond
Insights
The network in numbers
Four M&E cycles, 134 projects, 38 cities. What the official record shows — and what it doesn't.
Portfolio momentum — four cycles, 2022 to 2025
Focus area shifts — how priorities moved across four M&E cycles
Country participation — projects documented per cycle, 2022 → 2025
Country specialisation — portfolio mix by focus area, 2025
Projects per million city residents — 2025
Four patterns the record shows
Evidence quality — what can be verified row by row
Citizen impact, documented
Top investments — largest documented projects by value
What "completed" actually means — 18 projects self-defined as done
What ASCN measures — and what it doesn't
M&E maturity vs peer networks — 7 features, 5 systems
IMD Smart City Index 2024 — how ASEAN cities rank globally
ASCN in global context — beside India, the EU and China
ASCAP 2026–2035 alignment — where today's portfolio maps to tomorrow's pillars
The delivery gap — completed vs ongoing by focus area, 2025
Digital maturity vs ASCN activity — connectivity, rankings, project volume
5G readiness 2024 → 2030 — and the vendor geopolitics beneath it
The inclusivity test — Timor-Leste joins in 2026
Bilateral & multilateral commitments at scale — the ~170× gap
The research map — where ASCN scholarship comes from
Portfolio composition over four cycles — how the mix shifted
Country trajectories — who accelerated, who flatlined, 2022 → 2025
Project churn — unique projects, what survived four cycles?
Who finishes what — completion rates by country, 2025
Library & Open Data
The knowledge base behind this platform.
Official documents
Source reports, free to download
Knowledge library
Everything we read — official docs, academic papers, reports, research
Methodology & sources
External data sources
Methodology & limits