Page 200 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

Finally, municipalities can make alliances with others to share knowledge and good practices.
Examples of this are the Covenant of Mayors and Energy Cities, the mainstream European
movement involving local and regional authorities, voluntarily committing to increasing energy
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efficiency and use of renewable energy sources on their territories. Energy Cities is the European
Association of local authorities in energy transition. It was created in 1990 and represents now more
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than 1,000 towns and cities in 30 countries.

4.2 National and regional governments

National and regional governments have remit on many issues and policies that affect cities and
therefore are considered a SSC stakeholder. For instance, policies related to deployment of new
infrastructure such as optic fibers or mobile connectivity, or related to subjects like health or
education that without being specific to cities are also included in the SSC; usually belong to the
national government. Similarly, much of the information that can be made available to the citizens
through the open data platforms belongs to the central administration.

In order to drive the transition to SSC, national governments should define legal frameworks that
enable the implementation of many of the smart sustainable cities features. For example in China,
the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), designs the macro policies of national
economic and social development. In order to build SSC, NDRC also leads the strategy planning for
smart cities, coordinating with dozens of units of central government. Another clear example can
be found in Spain, where the policies that regulate low‐voltage distribution in multi‐family blocks
prevents the installation of electric vehicle charging points in communal parking areas. A
modification to this policy that includes a solution to this issue will be essential to allow the
widespread adoption of electric vehicles on a city level.

Discussions have begun about on the application of the principles behind SSC to regions, either to
analyse urban regions around a big city, or agglomerations of small towns. In the first case, it is
about coordinating the urban area as a whole since usually many people from the surrounding areas
work at the city centre and there is a lot of mobility around the entire urban area. In the second
case, the idea is to generate efficiency by creating collaborations between the towns and villages in
an area. For instance, if they want to provide a service that would not be cost‐effective for a town
of their size, they can provide it together and benefit from economies of scale. In these cases,
regional governments can have a leading role helping the mayors of the municipalities involved, and
acting as coordinators of these clusters, and as promoters of the initiatives.

As in the case of municipalities, it is also interesting to analyse the different units or ministries
involved, as illustrated in Table 2. As in the case of city units, government units or ministries are not
the same in all countries, so the names used in the examples may differ in some cases.

Table 2 – Examples of the role of different national Ministries and units in SSCs

 Ministry of Infrastructure, Industry and Information Technology
This is the ministry that has to fulfil the challenge of creating or modifying the policies related to infrastructure
deployment and therefore can be decisive in the development of SSC. Issues regarding Electromagnetic Field (EMF)
planning considerations on a national level must be transmitted by this unit to local governments and their particular
units dealing with this issue.

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30 Covenant of Mayors. http://www.covenantofmayors.eu/index_en.html
31 Energy Cities. http://www.energy‐cities.eu/

190 ITU‐T's Technical Reports And Specifications