Among the 10 leading smart cities in the world, as of 2024, seven were in Europe. That’s no coincidence.
The European Union puts a lot of resources into the data infrastructure that supports smart city initiatives, from urban mobility to low emission zones to IoT-backed tourism.
Specifically, the EU is working toward persistent, secure, and equitable ecosystems for the data that powers smart cities. In fact, the European strategy for data defines nine areas in which to pool equally accessible data: the Common European Data Spaces.
Read more: Smart Cities and EU Compliance: Data Governance and Sustainability
This Platform is vendor-independent, ensuring fair and democratic access to AI technologies developed in Europe, including generative AI and large language models.
The European innovation ecosystem EIT Digital has announced that the flagship European artificial intelligence (AI) project DeployAI is being brought to market to make AI solutions more accessible to the public sector and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Read more: EU: DeployAI platform aims to democratise AI for public sector
According to IMARC Group, the Europe smart cities market size is projected to exhibit a growth rate (CAGR) of 13.95% during 2024-2032.
The report has segmented the market by Focus area (smart transportation, smart buildings, smart utilities, smart citizen services), smart transportation (smart ticketing, traffic management system, passenger information management system, freight information system, connected vehicles, and others), smart buildings (building energy optimization, emergency management system, parking management system, and others), smart utilities (advanced metering infrastructure, distribution management system, substation automation, and others), smart citizen services (smart education, smart healthcare, smart public safety, smart street lighting, and others), and country.
Read more: Europe Smart Cities Market To Set Massive CAGR Of 13.95% During 2024-2032
One of the biggest obstacles to deploying energy efficiency solutions is the part of it you can’t see – the lack of data interoperability between various components. Europe is struggling to ensure smart energy efficiency is truly interconnected.
Today, Europe finds itself at an energy efficiency crossroads. There are more digital applications using household, company and transport energy more efficiently. But at the same time, the various systems are not able to communicate with appliances and utilities effectively, to make switching to smart energy simple for consumers.
Read more: Getting smarter? Europe struggling with smart energy efficiency interconnectivity
How to monetise environmental benefits? What’s the value of reducing traffic and emissions? Economic savings and traditional methods are not enough: to calculate the profitability of smart and sustainable cities, we need to rethink the concept of business model.
Forty trillion euros. It’s the sum needed to decarbonize the EU economy by 2050, according to a report by the Institut Rousseau that the French think tank presented in February at the European Greens Congress. Investments that involve both private and public actors.
Read more: EU: Old concepts, new paradigms: the business model challenge in the smart city era