In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, cities around the world are accelerating efforts to evolve into "smart cities" - urban areas that leverage advanced technologies, data-driven systems, and innovative operating models to improve quality of life, service efficiency, sustainability and economic resilience for residents. However, many past smart city initiatives have struggled to gain full traction due to taking a limited, top-down, technology-first approach that failed to fully account for diverse human needs and ensure stakeholder buy-in.The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) Smart Cities Initiative and TUS Solution (a system engineering company based in Mongolia) are proposing a new framework called the INCOSE-TUS Smart Cities Reference Model to help overcome these shortcomings. This human-centric model aims to guide city authorities in making decisions centered around holistically fulfilling the fundamental needs of residents through inclusive stakeholder integration and comprehensive social systems thinking.The core premise is that the primary purpose of any city should be creating an environment that enables all of its residents to satisfy their basic human needs in mutually beneficial, fair and sustainable ways. This aligns with the influential human needs theory and taxonomy developed by Chilean economist and environmentalist Manfred Max-Neef in the 1980s, which outlines nine fundamental human needs: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, creation, leisure, identity, and freedom. Max-Neef posited that these nine needs are universal, applying to all humans regardless of culture, age, gender or socioeconomic status. Furthermore, he emphasized that needs must be understood as interdependent and complementing each other - for example, the need for subsistence augments one's ability to be protected, create, participate and ultimately find freedom. By centeri-ng smart city development around holistically serving these core human needs, the INCOSE-TUS Framework provides a consistent, equitable and human-centric foundation.Importantly, rather than purely allowing new technologies to be the focus and driver, the INCOSE-TUS model views technologies as enablers - solutions that should be mapped to addressing specific resident needs through coordinated efforts across a city's diverse stakeholder groups. The framework identifies two main stakeholder categories: beneficiaries (the residents themselves) and service providers (entities that deliver resources, services and capabilities satisfying resident needs).Beneficiary stakeholders encompass all resident groups segmented by attributes like age, culture, socioeconomic status, disability status, housing situation and more. Service provider stakeholders are divided into social systems (human-to-human services like healthcare), natural systems (managing the human-nature intersection like utilities and environment), and advanced integrated systems (combining human, natural and built/technological environments like transportation, housing and physical infrastructure).Simplified Framework of the INCOSE-TUS Smart City FrameworkBy conducting a thorough analysis of these interdependent stakeholder roles, responsibilities, needs and interests, the INCOSE-TUS Framework can identify gaps, overlaps, tensions and areas for coordination in how a city holistically supports fulfillment of resident quality of life requirements across all groups. This stakeholder-based approach also promotes active engagement, representation and buy-in from impacted communities during the smart city visioning, planning and implementation process - critical for long-term sustainability.To evaluate smart city performance in a standardized manner, the framework proposes a set of unified metrics centered on "engineered quality data" - information that is real-time, documented, integrated, inclusive, aligned and uniformly defined across stakeholders. Key evaluation metrics include:The Tailored Unified System (TUS) Index, measuring how well a city's overall solutions and services meet resident needsThe System Properties Alignment (SPA) Index, assessing whether solutions are complementary and non-conflicting across stakeholdersThe System Operation Performance (SOP) Index, reflecting how effectively stakeholders are executing their roles and responsibilitiesA tailored Well-Being Index tracking the city's progress on its specific common mission and key quality of life goals for residentsA Social Responsibility (SR) Index evaluating the city's policies and practices in terms of environmental impacts and sustainabilityThe Well-Being Index is particularly important, as it provides a direct quantitative link between smart city investments and measurable outcomes in residents' lived experiences across the nine fundamental needs. It is based on internationally standardized indicators for areas like health, housing, income, education, civic engagement, access to green space, arts/culture participation and more.By taking this human-centric, equitable, stakeholder-driven approach, the INCOSE-TUS Framework aims to increase engagement, buy-in and realistic implementation of smart city solutions that truly benefit all residents over the long-term. Rather than layering new technologies onto fragmented legacy systems in a piecemeal fashion, it provides an integrated systems-based methodology to strategically transform city operating models, policies, funding and practices around holistically fulfilling fundamental human needs.The framework acknowledges that "the transformation from the old smart city framework to the new human-centric INCOSE-TUS framework is not going to be an easy one." Evolving will require cities to fundamentally adapt entrenched policies, governance processes, jurisdictional boundaries, budget models, public-private partnership approaches and even cultural mindsets in some cases. However, by centering all smart city efforts around measurable quality of life outcomes tied to fundamental human needs, this principled approach provides a clear unified vision to maintain core purpose while responsibly embracing technological and operational change.By moving away from a limited technology-focused model and instead fully embracing human-centered design principles, stakeholder integration and quality of life metrics rooted in fundamental human needs, the INCOSE Smart Cities Initiative aims to help define the next generation of "smart cities" around the world. Cities that view technological investments as means rather than ends. Cities that are oriented around maximizing inclusive civic participation and buy-in. Cities that equally weigh and actively measure improvements to education, health, safety, environmental sustainability, arts/culture access and community cohesion - not just economic indicators.