Residents of the Eco Delta Smart Village in Busan, South Korea are living in a test bed of innovation—literally. The pilot neighborhood consists of 54 hyper-connected households tricked out with the tech to do everything from measure energy consumption to steam-clean clothes. Oh, and there are robots that monitor the streets for safety. Residents live in the area rent-free in exchange for offering up data on how they’re using all that whiz-bang stuff. The data is then shared with South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, which is working with other government agencies as well as private companies to perfect smart city living—creating a KRW6.6 trillion made-from-scratch metropolis that can flex into the future. “We plan to have a standard model of a smart city and export that to the world,” Lee Jae Min, the ministry’s deputy director of the project, told the New York Times. To turn all those futuristic visions into reality, agency leaders have recruited an all-...