Know what flows.Shape what grows.
Resource intelligence for cities
See how water, energy, food and waste move through a city, and make decisions with the whole system in view.
ComplexCity Digital makes that possible by turning scattered utility, operational and financial data into a single, continuously updated resource account, showing city and business leaders where money and resources are being lost, where emissions and compliance risks sit, and which decisions will yield the greatest return, from a single building to a whole city.
Why it matters
The future is being built in cities, and how they manage their resources will decide what kind of future it is.
The world faces a polycrisis: climate change, resource scarcity, financial strain, social insecurity and political instability, each compounding the others. Cities are where these crises converge, and where they hit hardest, from Africa's fast-growing cities, where urban populations are set to double by 2050, to established cities worldwide facing ageing infrastructure and rising costs. When leaders can see how their city's water, energy, food and waste connect, and what each costs in carbon and money, they can tackle these problems together rather than one at a time.
What sustainability and resilience mean for a city
Enough water, power and food for everyone, now and as the city grows, at a cost it can keep paying.
Taps, lights and food supplies that keep working through a drought, flood or price shock, and recover quickly when they don't.
Both come down to the same practical questions: what flows through the city, what it costs, who it reaches, and what depends on what.
of global greenhouse gas emissions come from urban areas.
UN-Habitat, World Cities Report 2024faster growth in exposure to river flooding in cities than in rural areas since 1975.
UN-Habitat, World Cities Report 2024Africans will live in cities by 2050, double the 700 million of 2020.
AfDB, Cities Alliance, OECD/SWAC & UCLG Africa, Africa's Urbanisation Dynamics 2025urban residents could face average annual temperatures above 29°C by 2040 if emissions go unchecked.
UN-Habitat, World Cities Report 2024Investments in adaptation and resilience return more than $10 in benefits for each $1 over ten years, and over half of those benefits arrive even if no disaster strikes.
WRI, Strengthening the Investment Case for Climate Adaptation, 2025The same way of running cities will not produce different results.
- Connected, yet fragmented. Water, energy, food and waste depend on one another, yet are planned, managed and reported separately.
- Impacts spread, unaccounted for. A saving in one department can become a cost in another, and nobody counts it. Over time, the city becomes more wasteful and more fragile.
- Reporting comes too late. Costly annual reports describe problems long after they could have been fixed.
ComplexCity Digital connects these pieces into a single resource account, giving departments a shared view and leaders the means to direct spending where it matters most, cut emissions and waste, and see which communities are well served and which are left behind. In short, we help cities do more with less.
Issues in one area often have far-reaching consequences.
A change in one system sets off knock-on effects in others, often far from where it started. Our platform makes them visible.
A leaking pipe becomes an electricity bill.
Every litre lost was already pumped and treated, using power the city paid for.
- Environmental: Energy and treatment are spent on water that never reaches anyone, along with the emissions that come with them.
- Social: Lower pressure and more interruptions, usually felt first by households at the end of the line.
- Governance: The city pays to produce water it can't bill, which leaves less for the repairs that would fix it.
A power cut becomes a sanitation crisis.
When pumps stop, sewers back up and overflow.
- Environmental: Sewage overflows into rivers and wetlands.
- Social: Health risks fall on the communities closest to the overflow.
- Governance: Clean-ups and clinic costs land on departments that never caused the outage.
Food waste becomes fuel left on the table.
In a landfill it rots. In a digester it becomes energy and fertiliser.
- Environmental: In landfill, food releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
- Social: Landfills, with their smell and pests, often sit beside poorer neighbourhoods.
- Governance: Collection and landfill budgets are spent burying a resource that could produce energy and fertiliser.
Today's infrastructure becomes tomorrow's constraint.
What a city builds today fixes how it uses resources for decades. Planned for one system alone, it can miss cheaper shared solutions.
- Environmental: Systems planned in isolation lock in higher resource use and emissions for decades.
- Social: Where infrastructure goes decides who is served first, and who waits.
- Governance: Money is spent on assets that are too big, duplicated or left unused.
The city as a system
Move one dial, and watch where the city feels it.
A simplified model of a city with four neighbourhoods, from a high-income hillside to a low-lying riverside. Change a tariff or a supply, and every other part of the system responds, not always where you would expect.
Move a dial, or pick a scenario, to see what changes and where.
An illustrative model: the relationships are simplified and the values are indices, not measurements. The platform does this with a city's own data. Talk to us about running it on yours.
How it works
From scattered data to decisions you can defend.
Most cities already hold the data. We turn it into intelligence, alongside their teams.
One connected model of the city
Separate sources are linked, and as resources move through the city, their carbon emissions and costs are calculated automatically, with no separate carbon audit. Because every tonne is traced back to the flows behind it, from leaks and pumping to the energy mix and landfill, a city sees not just how much it emits, but why, and where to act. The more often data comes in, the sharper the picture.
- 01 · Data strategy
A data strategy that feeds intelligence.
Identify the data that informs decisions, and fill the gaps.
- 02 · Resource account
Build the resource account.
Link it into one account of every flow, with its carbon and cost.
- 03 · Reporting
Track, report and decide.
Track automatically, and report to each audience from live data, not a costly annual consultant's report.
Sustainability and compliance stop being a cost and start creating value, now and in the years ahead.
Watch
Understanding a city as a complex system.
The platform
The city's metabolism as one resource account, seen through carbon and finance.
Like a living body, a city takes in resources, uses them and gets rid of waste. This is its metabolism. Our platform keeps one account of it: how much water, energy, food and waste moves through the city, where it goes, and what each costs in carbon and money. Other resources can be added to suit each client.
Intelligent, not just smart.
Adds sensors, apps and dashboards, often one department at a time.
Technology as the goal.
Connects data across systems, so people can understand the whole city and act on it.
More informed decisions as the goal.
ComplexCity Digital builds intelligence: technology that is useful because it is connected, and grounded in how the city actually works.
Who it's for
Anyone whose decisions shape a city or precinct.
It works in any city, from fast-growing to long-established, and at every scale, from a whole city to a precinct, such as a waterfront or campus, down to a single building.
Plan across departments
Prioritise infrastructure and budget for knock-on effects.
Talk to us →Invest with confidence
Base funding on how a city really works, and show the wider impact.
Talk to us →Know the footprint early
See a project's demand on water, power and waste before breaking ground.
Talk to us →Turn targets into action
Link carbon and resource targets to real assets and places.
Talk to us →Where it started
Proven at the V&A Waterfront.
A peer-reviewed study found that managing water, energy and food together strengthened the V&A Waterfront's ability to plan for resilience. It named the platform behind ComplexCity Digital, which tracks how resources flow through the precinct, as the most important factor in that success. We are now taking this approach to whole cities, and expect similar benefits.
Source: Swart, Swilling & Gcanga (2024), Energies 17(16), 4005Where we work
Out of the gates with a five-city rollout across Africa.
Our first programme is underway with municipal teams in five selected African cities.
The rollout is funded by the Quadrature Charitable Foundation.
Future directions
Modelling what's coming, not just what's here.
We are extending the platform to model the forces that will reshape cities, and to test decisions before they are made.
Floods, droughts and heat
See how an extreme event spreads through services, and who is exposed first.
More people, more sprawl
Project rising demand, and compare the cost of building outwards versus inwards.
How people and goods move
Link transport to energy, emissions and access.
Try decisions first
Run projects and shocks through the model before money is spent, with AI helping to generate scenarios and surface the trade-offs between them.
Our foundations
Informed by research. Refined by practice.
Our name comes from complexity theory, which holds that a system lives in the relationships between its parts, so that breaking it apart to study or manage it loses the very connections that make it work. Cities are largely run this way, one department and one resource at a time, a model refined over a century of modern planning and engineering that brought order and efficiency to growing cities, but which is now showing its limits, as compounding pressures expose the connections it was never built to see. Restoring those relationships is what we set out to do. Our work draws on research into complexity theory, urban governance, urban metabolism, the water-energy-food nexus and sustainability transitions, and our tools are developed on the ground with the people who will use them, because complex urban problems are rarely solved from a distance.
- Research
A tested method
- Precinct
Proven at precinct level
- City
Scaled up in Cape Town
Leadership
The team behind ComplexCity Digital.
Garth Malan
Garth leads ComplexCity Digital's strategy and city partnerships, working directly with city teams from their first data through to the decisions it informs. He is a registered professional engineer (PrEng) with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA, and a PhD candidate.
Kevin James
Founder and CEO of GCX, whose DASH analytics platform is the engine behind ComplexCity Digital.
Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST)
Stellenbosch University. Our approach is grounded in CST's research on sustainability transitions and the future of African cities.
Contact
Let's map your city.
Tell us a little about your city, portfolio or project, and we'll be in touch.