Know what flows.Shape what grows.
Resource intelligence for smart cities
See how a city's resources move together, and make better-informed decisions about them.
Climate, resource, financial, social and political crises are converging on cities. ComplexCity Digital gives city leaders the systems intelligence to respond.
Why it matters
Cities are where sustainability and resilience will be won or lost.
Globally, we face a polycrisis: climate change, resource scarcity, financial strain, social insecurity and political instability, each amplifying the others. Cities are where these crises meet, and where they hit hardest, especially in Africa. Seeing how a city's water, energy, food and waste connect, and what each costs in carbon and money, lets leaders tackle them together rather than one at a time.
Meeting today's needs without running down tomorrow's.
Keeping services running through the shock, and recovering stronger.
Both depend on knowing what flows through a city, and where its systems lean on each other.
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 and reported separately.
- Impacts propagate unaccounted for. A saving in one department can quietly become a cost in another, and nobody counts it, so the city grows more wasteful and more fragile.
- Reporting comes too late. Costly annual reports describe problems long after they could have been fixed.
ComplexCity Digital brings the pieces together in one place, so departments can understand each other and work together, and the whole system benefits: leaders can spend where it counts, cut emissions and waste, and see which communities are well served and which are left out. In short, it helps cities do more with less.
How the links play out
Every link carries a cost somewhere.
Making those trade-offs visible is what the platform does.
A leaking pipe is an electricity bill.
Every litre lost was already pumped and treated, using power the city paid for.
Paying to produce water that earns nothing.
A power cut is a sanitation crisis.
When pumps stop, sewage can overflow into rivers and streets.
Health risks fall on the communities closest to the overflow.
Food waste is fuel left on the table.
In a landfill it rots. In a digester it becomes energy and fertiliser.
Landfilled food releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Every pipe, plant and power line is a decades-long bet.
What a city builds today fixes how it uses resources for decades. Planned for one system alone, it can miss cheaper shared solutions.
Oversized, duplicated or stranded assets.
Watch
Systems thinking in cities.
The platform
The city's metabolism as one resource account, seen through carbon and finance.
Cities take in resources, use them and release waste, much like a living body. Our platform maps that metabolism as one system: water, energy, food and waste at the core, extra modules for each client's priorities, and carbon and finance measured across every flow.
How it works
From scattered data to decisions you can defend.
Most cities already hold data, scattered across departments. We turn it into intelligence, working alongside city teams.
One connected model of the city
Data from separate spreadsheets is linked, so every flow can be traced to its cost and emissions.
- 01 · Data strategy
A data strategy that feeds intelligence.
Many places collect data for its own sake. We help you identify which data actually informs decisions, where the gaps are and how to fill them, then link it into one model.
- 02 · Resource account
Build the resource account.
Every flow of water, energy, food and waste is tracked, with its carbon and financial cost.
- 03 · Reporting
Track, report and decide.
Tracking and reporting are automated from real data and tailored to each stakeholder, instead of relying on costly consultants and annual reporting exercises.
Sustainability and compliance stop being a cost to report on and become a source of value, today and in the years ahead.
Who it's for
Anyone whose decisions shape a city or precinct.
It works 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 →Resource flows in everyday life
From the dam to the dinner table.
Resource flows are woven into daily life: a standpipe, a corner shop, a busy market. Mostly invisible, until one fails. ComplexCity Digital follows them from the city to the street, and brings them onto one screen.
Where we work
Out of the gates with a five-city rollout across Africa.
Our first programme is already under way: deploying the platform with municipal teams in five African cities.
Quelimane
Adama
Lilongwe
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.
Our foundations
Informed by research. Refined by practice.
Our approach draws on doctoral research into the water-energy-food nexus in African cities, and has been refined by working with real places and real data.
- 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 strategy and city partnerships. A registered professional engineer (PrEng), he holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA.
Kevin James
Founder and CEO of GCX, whose DASH analytics platform is the engine behind ComplexCity Digital.
Prof. Mark Swilling
Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Development at Stellenbosch University and co-director of its Centre for Sustainability Transitions.
Contact
Let's map your city.
Tell us a little about your city, portfolio or project, and we'll be in touch.