BABLE Smart Cities

🌿 Cities are finally starting to breathe easier. Air quality monitoring is becoming one of the most powerful tools urban planners have, and the results are remarkable.

Over 300,000 premature deaths occur in the EU every year due to poor air quality, according to the European Environment Agency. The good news? Cities that invest in smart monitoring are already turning that around.

The data exists, the technology is ready, and forward-thinking cities are now connecting air quality insights directly to the decisions that shape how people live, move, and build.
When monitoring becomes granular, real-time, and embedded into planning, something shifts. Policy stops being reactive and starts being preventive.

One of the clearest examples of this in action: Milan deployed a city-wide air quality monitoring network that feeds directly into urban planning decisions — turning invisible pollution patterns into visible, actionable policy.

We broke it down as a full use case here 👉 https://ow.ly/70Yk50Z4BOe

Cities that get this right are setting a new standard for what urban health looks like.
Vote below — and if your city is linking air data to real planning decisions, we'd love to hear your approach. Full case study is in the comments 👇

What's the biggest opportunity in urban air quality monitoring?
◻️ Hyper-local data for planning
◻️ Real-time citizen alerts
◻️ Pollution linked to mobility
◻️ Air data shaping policy

Most city challenges have already been solved somewhere.

The politics are different, the budget and the stakeholders are different. But the problem itself? Another city has almost certainly faced it and figured it out.

The challenge isn't solving it from scratch. It's knowing where to look.

That's why we built our Use Cases library: a growing collection of real-world smart city projects, mapped by topic, city type, and solution.

It allows you to see what worked before and build on it instead of starting over, because no city should have to solve the same problem twice.

👉 Explore our use cases: https://ow.ly/RnPz50Z2JnG

Which Smart City solution would you have picked?
At the Urban Shark Tank during the Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2026, three bold innovators showcased their ideas live and the results are in! Innovation met impact, and our expert jury selected the top solutions ready to accelerate change in cities. 🚀

🏅 1st place: SmartRoads AI
🥈 2nd place: LandOS
🥉 3rd place: oGov

A huge thank you to our Sharks for their sharp questions, bold insights, and unwavering commitment to urban innovation:
🦈 Leonor P**a P**a, Director, Link to Leaders
🦈 Mauro Camarinha, Department Director of Digital Strategy and Innovation, Municipality of Oeiras
🦈 Inês Pinho, Hubs Operations Lead, Unicorn Factory Lisboa

And to all participants and partners who made this session such a success.

The ideas are bold. Now comes the hard part: scaling them. Let us know what it would take to bring these solutions to your city? 👇

Unpopular opinion: we've been overcomplicating Smart Cities. 🚌

No new infrastructure, no million-euro pilot, no 5-year roadmap. Just a repurposed bus, a weekly route through rural Denmark, and elderly residents who now have reliable access to fresh groceries for the first time in years.

The initiative, run by a Danish supermarket chain, converts decommissioned buses into fully stocked mobile stores that stop in villages too small and too remote for traditional retail. It tackles food access, social isolation, and sustainable use of existing assets all at once.

What if cities asked a better question: what do we already have, and who are we leaving out?

Denmark's Innovative Mobile Grocery Stores for Rural Elderly | Artsvi Arakelyan posted on the topic | LinkedIn Denmark once again proves that innovation is not only about technology ․․․ it’s about people. By transforming old buses into mobile grocery stores, fresh food is being delivered directly to elderly people living in rural areas. This is more than a creative idea. It’s a powerful example of ...

Some of the most important conversations at GovTech 4 Impact World Congress in Madrid didn't happen on the main stage. They started over dinner. 🍽️

G4I is a global congress bringing together government leaders, mayors, and tech experts to move digital transformation from policy to real impact. At its heart this year was the inaugural Mayors' Leadership Forum, a dedicated space for city leaders to move beyond discussion and into action.

Tamlyn Shimizu, Head of Global Markets & Partnerships, represented BABLE Smart Cities at the congress alongside city leaders and mayors from across Europe and the United States, including the Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR), LDT CitiVERSE EDIC, The U.S. Mayoral Roundtable, Alliance of European Mayors - Mayors of Europe and many others. The themes that surfaced over the dinner table: trust, the pull between competing and collaborating, and the sheer pace of change, became the thread running through everything that followed.

Here's what she brought back:
🔹Mayors and city leaders spent a full day co-creating the inaugural GovTech Manifesto and Action Plan — ten digital principles for Human Adaptive Cities, grounded in one core idea: people and nature at the centre of digital transformation. Not signing a document, but actively building one together, with concrete steps to drive momentum over the year ahead.
🔹Cities aren't short on ambition or ideas. The gap is structural. As one session put it directly: GovTech doesn't fail because of a lack of ideas. It fails because of a lack of financial architecture.
🔹Step by step is no longer enough. Incremental progress cannot meet the scale of today's societal challenges. Systemic change across government, business and civil society is the only way forward.

Is your city's Mayor ready to be part of this movement? The next steps are already being shaped, reach out to Tamlyn directly to find out how to get involved.

A huge thank you to Sharon Ehrlich Bershadsky, Jonas Onland, Svetlana Tesic, Fernando de Pablo Martín, Madrid City Council Digital Office, and Carlos Santiso from OECD - OCDE, and to all the mayors and city leaders who made this happen: Mayor Rian Van Dam, Cllr Tony Dyer, Mayor José de la Uz Pardos, Mayor Jacek Jaśkowiak, Mayor Mario De Mezzo, Deputy Mayor Predrag Puharic, Mayor Matjaž Rakovec, Mayor Shawyn Howard, Deputy Mayor Vito Episcopo, Councillor Jörk Cardeneo, George Burciaga, Nathan Ducastel, Jan Wester, Federica Bordelot and Marina MANZONI.

The future of cities isn't being planned, it's being built, right now, in the rooms that matter. Nordic Edge happens to be one of them. 🌇

Nordic Edge Expo brought together leaders, practitioners, and city representatives in Stavanger for two days of honest conversation about what it actually takes to shift communities toward resilience and sustainability.

Nikita Shetty, Head of Markets and Partnerships - Northern Europe joined representatives from Madrid, Bergamo, and Belfast on the Wicked Problems, Bold Moves mobility panel, and the themes from that session echoed across the entire event.

The conversations that cut through the noise::
🔹 Behaviour change is the hard part. Apps, campaigns, and better signage don't move people. You have to disrupt the habit loop, whether that's bus use in Kerry or construction sites in Oslo.
🔹 Cities are done planning for resilience. They're building it. Rotterdam, Stavanger, and others are tackling water infrastructure, cyber risk, and economic resilience in parallel.
🔹 The business case for decarbonisation needs finishing. The technology is ready. Procurement, grid capacity, and missing value chains are the real blockers. Councils acting as demand aggregators, not passive funders, are the ones moving.
🔹 Private capital wants impact. One euro invested in climate adaptation returns eight to forty in the long run. That framing matters.
And perhaps the line that landed hardest: Hope is not optimism. It is defiance. And it needs action behind it.

Huge thanks to the Nordic Edge team for creating the space for these conversations.

💬 Want to know more about what we heard and what it means for your city or organisation? Connect with Nikita Shetty

Cities don't transform through policy documents only, but also through the people who show up and share what's actually working. 🎙️

Urban Future 2026 in Ljubljana created that exact kind of momentum. The world's largest conference for urban changemakers, bringing together mayors, city leaders, and innovators each year to exchange what's genuinely moving the needle on the ground.

Gretel (Head of Markets & Partnerships for Southern Europe and Senior Governance and Digital Innovation Expert), Tamlyn (Head of Markets & Partnerships Global and Senior Communications Expert), and Alexander Schmidt (CEO and Founder) from BABLE Smart Cities were also there, and used the opportunity to sit down with some of the speakers and record truly insightful podcast episodes. Here's a taste of what those conversations brought:

Madrid: José Luis Cifuentes Sastre, Innovation, Promotion and Information Manager at Madrid City Council, walked us through a city turning its own municipal waste into the renewable energy that powers its buses and bikes. Circular logic, literally.

🇵🇹 Porto: Ricardo Ferreira da Silva, Programme Manager at Porto Vivo Urban Rehabilitation Society, on the tension every historic city faces. How do you preserve authenticity when tourism pulls one way and long-term residents get pushed out the other? His answer involves blended finance, cross-departmental coordination, and a stubborn commitment to keeping the city liveable for families.

🇱🇻 Riga: Signe Pērkone, Senior Project Leader and Architect at the City Development Department of the Municipality of Riga, on planning for a shrinking city. Riga uses spatial development plans not as blueprints, but as negotiation tools that align the departments responsible for actually delivering the future.

🇨🇦 Toronto: Daniel Fusca, Manager of Public Consultation at the City of Toronto, on why civic lotteries and citizens' assemblies change everything. Bring representative, diverse residents into the hard trade-offs early, and the decisions that come out are ones people will actually stand behind.

🇸🇮 Celje: Monika Tominšek, Head of Development, Projects and Economy Office, and Tanja Tamše, Expert Associate in the Department for Development, Projects and Economy, both at the Municipality of Celje, on solving brain drain not by making the city louder, but more responsive. Embedding participation into everyday governance, not just project milestones.

🇩🇪 Mannheim: Petar Drakul, City Centre Commissioner and Head of FutuRaum at the City of Mannheim, on the critical difference between merely participating in a process and taking genuine ownership of it. How bringing together over 30 diverse stakeholders to build a shared vision before implementing anything changes what's possible.

🇦🇹 Vienna: Johannes Lutter from Urban Innovation Vienna on the paradox of success. When a city works well, the urgency to change it quietly disappears, even when change is exactly what's needed. This one is coming this week.

A huge thank you to Urban Future for another fantastic media partnership, and to each of our guests for the time, openness, and depth they brought to these conversations.

Each of these episodes is live on Smart in the City, The BABLE Podcast. Vienna is coming this week, follow our podcast page so you catch it when it drops.

What if the most powerful urban transformation tool already exists in the centre of your city? 🚉

The answer might be simpler than you think: the railway station. Yet across Europe, this asset sits vastly underutilised, more transit point than neighbourhood hub.

RAIL4CITIES is a European project working to change that, exploring how stations can evolve into sustainable, inclusive centres for mobility, circular economy, and community life through living labs, co-creation, and impact analysis.

It's an approach with real potential, because railway stations sit at the heart of cities, yet most remain disconnected from the neighbourhoods around them.

So here's this week's challenge 🏆: in your city, what would make a railway station a true neighbourhood hub? Better public space, local services, greener infrastructure, or something else entirely? Drop your answer in the comments. 👇

📲 Scan the QR code if you want to explore what this could look like in your city.

Several GovTech AI projects cost more to operate than to build. That was one of the sharpest reminders from G4I 2026 in Madrid, and it's a conversation the sector isn't having loudly enough.

Gretel Schaj, our Head of Markets & Partnerships and Senior Governance & Digital Innovation Expert, was there. Two insights from her conversations stood out:
🔹Citizen trust isn't designed, it's earned. The Ukrainian case showed that digital services built for real moments of need are the ones people actually use. Aesthetics don't build trust. Usefulness does.
🔹AI sovereignty isn't binary. It's a spectrum that needs to be designed in from day one, not bolted on once deployment is already underway.

Deploying AI in government is accelerating. Making it sustainable, sovereign, and scalable is the harder and much more of a important conversation.
Want to explore what that looks like in practice for your city or region? Reach out to Gretel directly and check out her Linkedin post👇



Original Linkedin Post:

#g4i2026 #govtech #ai #sovereignty #digitalresilience | Gretel Schaj It seems like deploying AI in governments is happening fast. However, deploying large-scale, sustainable, and sovereign AI projects is not so much. This was one of the topics discussed at in Madrid. Several of my conversations touched on this subject and the difficulty of transforming the h...