Today, around 1.3 billion people – roughly 16% of the world’s population – live in unplanned settlements. That number is expected to grow by at least another billion in the next 30 years, due to rapid urbanisation.
These settlements, often described as slums, shanty towns, favelas or low-income communities, typically grow outside formal planning systems, developing before roads, drainage, water, land titles, public services or building approvals are properly in place. This creates problems like unsafe housing, poor sanitation, increased flood risk and congestion – which are difficult and expensive to reverse once entrenched.
This is why rapid urbanisation is such an urgent, human problem. It is also a highly complex, interconnected one – and an example of a larger class of ‘systems problems’ that new quantum computational approaches may help us tackle.
Many of society’s toughest challenges, from energy management and cancer research to ecological stewardship, involve vast numbers of interacting variables and potential long-term consequences. The challenge is not a lack of data; cities, for example, generate masses of data – it is understanding how complex systems and variables affect one another to inform better, faster decision-making.
AI can help by extracting patterns and insights from vast datasets. Quantum computing may complement these capabilities by offering new ways to explore highly complex optimisation problems involving many interacting variables and trade-offs. Together, these technologies may eventually enable us to ask and answer questions that are difficult to address using conventional approaches alone.
However, adopting frontier technologies like quantum is complex and requires much more than just securing access to computing hardware. If we are to apply quantum successfully to address real-world problems, we must also create the conditions for institutional adoption.
Why institutional adoption matters
Recent advances in areas including error correction are among the reasons why quantum is increasingly moving beyond the familiar idea of useful solutions being perpetually ’10 years away’. It has become a strategic technology that could provide nations with their next generation of major competitive advantage over the coming decades.
Yet transformative technologies tend to create social and economic value only once institutions learn how to use them responsibly. By institutions, I mean governments, universities, foundations, public agencies and industrial partners – organisations with the mandate, expertise and long-term responsibility to manage complex systems.
Electricity and the internet did not reshape society simply because the underlying technologies existed; their impact emerged as institutional talent, applications, workflows, and capabilities developed around them.
Today, the people and sector experts who understand cities, health, infrastructure or agriculture are typically not the same people who understand quantum, nor are the two groups working together enough. There are still relatively few people capable of translating complex domain problems into applications that can be tested using quantum technologies. This is one of the biggest gaps we need to close. Quantum adoption cannot scale unless institutions develop application-side capability and create ways for domain experts to work directly with quantum engineers and application developers.
Secure quantum infrastructure will also take time to build. Defining new, responsible workflows and governance requires long-term public and private sector partnerships.
Governments are beginning to recognise this. In the UK, national strategy and investment are linking quantum progress to skills, talent, procurement, infrastructure and adoption in key sectors. Recent US policy points in a similar direction, with a focus on deployment, commercialisation, workforce development and resilience. These are positive signals, but they underline the central challenge: hardware progress and investment alone will not lead to adoption – unless institutions also build the applications, talent and operating capabilities required to put the technology to use.
To help ensure these kinds of national initiatives and investments deliver meaningful outcomes, the quantum sector must avoid spending too much time talking to itself about qubits and technological progress – and focus equally on engaging institutions to build their quantum understanding and capability.
Only together can we create the practical, repeatable models needed for scalable quantum adoption and apply them to important issues like rapid urbanisation – which is precisely what the Harmonious Urban Growth project seeks to achieve.
A repeatable model for applying quantum
Harmonious Urban Growth, developed in partnership with The King’s Foundation, is a three-year programme designed to help cities grow sustainably while improving the health of people and the planet. The initiative will incorporate advanced computational modelling, including quantum optimisation enabled by trapped-ion systems, to explore new methods for planning complex urban systems and sustainable town planning.
The repeatable framework the project is testing includes identifying a complex institutional problem, bringing together the right partners, structuring the data, applying advanced modelling, testing options with stakeholders, and building learning into the process.
In this case, The King’s Foundation is the institutional partner bringing the planning framework, local relationships and subject-matter expertise. Spatial planning specialists will support mapping and data while a quantum hardware provider supplies the technology. And our organisation, as the adoption partner, will actively develop the applications and implementation frameworks that connect the institutional problem to the technology, while building the operating model needed to put those applications to use.
The programme will keep human decision-making at the centre by using computational modelling to inform a participatory planning process in which planners, local authorities and community representatives review spatial options and shape the outcomes together.
Implementation is always the hardest part, but also the most exciting. Real-world use cases like this will help us test new operating models for quantum and create the feedback loops that will drive progress forward. Sector experts will learn what quantum can do while quantum developers learn what users actually need.
This is why the next phase of quantum adoption must be sector-led, human-led and application-led. Quantum’s next test is not simply whether the technology continues to advance. It is whether we can build the applications, capabilities and institutions needed to put it to work.
