Page 62 - Digital solutions for integrated city management and use cases: A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

This also makes global initiatives, such as United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC), valuable
due to their role as connectors and spot lighthouse of cities and communities as well as facilitators
of inter-city and regional collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

5.2 Governance

Project and city initiatives are usually managed in the local government by vertically structured
departments. These municipal departments usually work in vertical city silos. However, smart city
projects are generally multidisciplinary and involve different areas of the organization, as well as
collaboration with external stakeholders.

The creation of a smart city office, made up of a multidisciplinary team, can be a guarantee to align
the city’s vision, strategy along with policies for the digital transformation of municipal services, the
unified management of information and normalized relationship with external agents.

Unified governance around the city data platform becomes an opportunity to drive smart city
transformation. Unified information, dashboards and the introduction of “smart clauses” in the
technical specification of public procurements help to standardize the integration of data and
reports provided by internal departments and external stakeholders using open standards.

Cooperation and collaboration between the public-private domains will be essential as cities
continue to evolve into increasingly complex systems

5.3 Economic sustainability

Corporations and governments with a limited budget must satisfy the local services demanded by
citizens. The project of a smart city platform requires a large amount of investment and significant
operational costs. Common finance sources for carrying out Smart city projects are public budget
and Public-Private Partnerships (PPP). Other innovative financing instruments proposed are
crowdfunding, earmarking government funding, monetizing the local data collected, recoverable
investment funds, etc.
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There is a considerable difference between European municipalities and smart cities in India,
China or the US which are normally financed by national governments and private funding. But for
European local governments one of the most significant sources of financing projects are European
Union programmes. Within the EU, specific initiatives supported by the European Commission, such
as the “European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities” (EIP-SCC) provides clear
and practical information about opportunities of European funding (European Structural Investment
Funds, the European Investment Bank’s financial instruments as well as several programmes
managed by the European Commission and Member States .
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As an example, Figure 24 shows different financing structures that municipalities in the EU have
used for the commissioning and operational support of their city platforms .
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50 U4SSC: Digital solutions for integrated city management & use cases