A Smart City is a solution to the problems caused by increasing urbanization. Australia has demonstrated a strong determination for the development of Smart Cities. However, the country has experienced uneven growth in its urban development. The purpose of this study is to compare and identify the smartness of major Australian cities to the level of development in multi-dimensions. Eventually, the research introduces the openings to make cities smarter by identifying the focused priority areas. To ensure comprehensive coverage of all aspects of the smart city’s performance, 90 indicators were selected to represent 26 factors and six components. The results of the assessment endorse the impacts of recent government actions taken in different urban areas towards building smarter cities. The research has pointed out the areas of deficiencies for underperforming major cities in Australia. Following the results, appropriate recommendations for Australian cities are provided to improve the city’s smartness.

Despite spending ample resources and procedural development in flood management, flood losses are still increasing worldwide. The losses caused by floods and costs incurred on management are two components of expected annual damages (EAD) due to floods. This study introduces a generalized approach for risk-based design where a range of probable floods are considered before and after a flood mitigation measure is implemented. The proposed approach is customized from the ISO Guide 31000 along with additional advantages of flood risk visualization. A Geographic Information System (GIS)-based design of a flood-protection dike is performed to exhibit the risk redistribution. The Chenab River is selected for the existing dike system. Detailed hazard behaviour and societal vulnerability are modelled and visualized for a range of all probable floods before and after the implementation of flood-protection dikes. EAD maps demonstrate the redistribution of induced and residual risks. It can be concluded that GIS-based EAD maps not only facilitate cost-effective solutions but also provide an accurate estimate of residual risks after the mitigation measures are applied. EAD maps also indicate the high-risk areas to facilitate designing secondary measures.

A key driver of Australia’s economic development is through promoting migration. A strong bottleneck to achieve the targets is a disproportional concentration of population in the metropolitan cities. To avoid congestion in these cities, emphasis is being given at the government level to promote the regional cities. With different city ranking systems, this study tries to identify linkage between the city ranking and people’s preference to live there. The proposed ranking system uses six components, namely, economy, mobility, environment, people, living, and governance. A comparison is done between the ranking systems by first assigning the same weightage to the six components and then assigning different weightages based on people’s preferences. This study considered 112 Australian cities, which were ranked by considering their performance based on the non-weighted and weighted parameters. Analytical Hierarchy Process is then used to assign the priorities/preferences of the components, factors, and indicators. The study also incorporates clustering technique to address the issue of missing data/information that is a typical problem with small cities where missing data is a common issue. The results of the comparison demonstrate that assigning weightage to ranking parameters makes the city ranking closer to the preference of people to live in a city. It is also recommended that the city ranking system and urban governance should have closer connection to each other. The lowest performing city ranking parameter should be given higher preferences in urban management and development plans.