Smart Cities in Europe

Europe is one of the most urbanised regions in the world (Basse, 2010), and its larger urban areas have contributed to 70-80% of global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions attributed to the world’s cities (Harris et al., 2020; IPCC, 2022). Today, the European Union (EU), comprising 27 Member States, is the third-largest carbon emitter after China and the United States (Borozan, 2024; Shtjefni et al., 2024).

By 2050, 80% of the EU’s population will be urbanised (UN DESA, 2019, p.5). As the urban population grows, and extreme weather events linked to climate change cause economic damage and impact public health, there is an urgent demand for innovation and planning to improve the quality of urban life by maximising cities’ existing resources. Across the world, smart cities have emerged as a solution to future urban planning, in which real-time data is collected and analysed using interconnected systems of digital technology to improve wellbeing, manage a city’s assets, and increase competitiveness. 

Since September 2021, the EU Mission for 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities has aimed to transform the urban landscape of the EU by 2050. The initiative consists of developing 100 smart city prototypes by utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) to significantly reduce their carbon emissions and become smart hubs by 2030. However, this ambitious though challenging initiative raises serious ethical questions relating to data collection and individual privacy.

This article will discuss the emergence of smart cities in the EU, especially since 2021, and their implications for future urban sustainability and the privacy rights of citizens.

Figure 1: Global GHG emission trends by sector and key years (European Commission et al., 2024).

What are Smart Cities?

Three out of four Europeans live in urban areas (Musterd & Nijman, 2016, p.219), or roughly 74% of the continent’s population (Gaffikin, 2019, p.4; Harris et al., 2020). By 2050, this figure is expected to reach approximately 80% (UN DESA, 2019, p.5). As the EU’s urbanisation rate grows — built-up areas, for example, are projected to expand by 3% by 2030 (Competence Centre on Foresight, 2020) — there is an urgent demand for innovation and planning to improve the quality of urban life by maximising existing resources. Urban growth in the EU Member States was initially linked to the technology boom in manufacturing caused by the spread of the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the 18th century. However, the deindustrialisation that occurred in the late 20th century changed the push and pull factors of urban migration. Modern urbanisation trends and patterns, albeit “unfettered” and “laissez-faire” with negative consequences for residents (Kutty et al., 2022), have been transformed by digital and technological innovations in education, employment, transportation systems, and city regeneration (Clark et al., 2018; Jacques et al., 2024). The devastating effects of climate change on climate-sensitive resources — namely water and soil — in rural areas are also increasingly driving migration flows, a phenomenon known as “Environmental shock migration” (Moawad, 2024), to urban areas (Adger et al., 2020; Selod & Shilpi, 2021). The 27 EU Member States are not immune to this climate-driven upheaval and displacement (Hincks et al., 2023). In response, smart cities have emerged to address these unprecedented societal changes and complex challenges (Lee et al., 2022; Giela, 2023).

Since 2010, the global warming rate has more than doubled from the 0.18°C rate between 1970 and 2010 (Hansen et al., 2025), resulting in the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) declaring the decade 2011-2020 the warmest on record (WMO, 2023). There is, therefore, increasing demand for resilient housing, infrastructure, and services to sustain the growing urban populations in response to the frequency and severity of climate events expected in the future. The term “smart cities” first appeared in the 1990s (Rana et al., 2019, quoted in Shayan et al., 2020; Jacques et al., 2024a). Smart cities employ the technology of sensors, devices, and data centres in an interconnected IT network to collect and share real-time urban knowledge and data, or “human and social capital” (Szczepańska et al., 2023; Jong et al., 2024). This infrastructure aims to improve wellbeing, manage a city’s assets, and increase competitiveness (Arghittu et al., 2023; Gracias et al., 2023). The key elements of a smart city — economy, environment, living, people, mobility, and governance (Pira, 2021; Salvia et al., 2023) — are indicators of a city’s “smartness”. Their adoption and the integration of new technologies aim to maximise “efficiency gains” of an urban area’s existing resources and infrastructure (Ziosi et al., 2022).

The creation of smart cities is in its infancy, hence several definitions covering technology,  sustainability, and the role of humans (all quoted in Baculáková, 2020, p.70). Technology remains the cornerstone of smart cities’ functioning. However, human-centric definitions have been developed to highlight the importance of smart governance by public engagement and interaction, i.e. “the purpose of ‘smartness’ should be related to the fostering and development of public value, sustainability, cooperation, transparency, interactivity, and societal wellbeing” (McBride et al., 2022). By these definitions, smart cities are no longer technology-led; instead, the needs and wellbeing of residents are recognised as the driving force. The involvement of residents aims to increase the social equity and possibilities of innovation (Ahvenniemi et al., 2017, quoted in Kaiser, 2024; Chen et al., 2022). Indeed, through their literature review, Yigitcanlar et al. (2018) identify productivity, sustainability, accessibility, wellbeing, liveability, and governance as the core outcomes of the “smart city framework”.

Figure 2: Core components that make a smart city (JudyMiao, 2018).

Across the world, the number of smart cities is increasing (Appio et al., 2019). They have become “ubiquitous” (Joss et al., 2019) and a “global phenomenon” (Dameri et al., 2019)  and have evolved to share similar, but not uniform, features and principles relating to interactions between the public and private sectors and the use of technology to monitor and improve the efficiency of urban resources (Angelo & Vormann, 2018; Arghir, 2024, p.6). In Europe, Helsinki, the Finnish capital, and Zurich, Switzerland’s largest city, are considered two of the world’s leading smart cities according to the annual IMD Smart City Index report (IMD, 2025). Meanwhile, the cities of Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, and Copenhagen are also notable examples of creating sustainable, healthier environments through the implementation of digital solutions and innovative practices (Carro-Suárez et al., 2023; Carboni, 2024). The annual revenue of the global smart cities technology market has been reported to be US$121 billion in 2023, and is expected to reach US$301 billion by the beginning of the 2030s (Wray, 2023). However, a 2024 UN-Habitat report — World Smart Cities Outlook 2024 — states the full potential of smart cities “has yet to be fully leveraged globally” as the growth and development of cities, especially in Africa and Asia, remain uneven (UN-Habitat, 2024). Smart technology is expensive, depriving low-income communities of government investment (Shelton & Clark, 2017), but, as Gerli et al. (2024) report, this social class is “frequently excluded from smart city projects.” This uneven distribution and implementation of technology by private interests in favour of more privileged communities and the privatisation of public services demonstrate the neoliberal agenda of smart cities (Kitchin et al., 2019; Jong et al., 2024), which can exacerbate existing systemic and urban inequalities in gender, health, and income (Shelton & Clark, 2017, p.106; Caragliu & Bo, 2021), risking social fragmentation.

The rising GHG emissions driving climate change are overwhelmingly anthropogenic, i.e. caused by human activities (Kabir et al., 2023; Rothenberg, 2023; Pata et al., 2024; Summerhayes et al., 2024). Today, the EU is the third-largest carbon emitter after China and the United States (Borozan, 2024; Shtjefni et al., 2024). Although the EU’s urban areas occupy only 17% of land area (Salvia et al., 2023), of which 4% are cities (European Environment Agency, 2019, quoted in Rizzati et al., 2023), they are major energy consumers and contribute to the 70-80% of global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions attributed to the world’s cities (Harris et al., 2020; IPCC, 2022). The buildings of EU cities alone account for 42% of energy consumption (Yeatts et al., 2017). Consequently, Ziosi et al. (2022) write, “cities are the sites where most consumption and production occur and where most of the negative environmental externalities originate.” Kilkiş et al. (2024) believe climate change mitigation is heavily dependent on adopting rigorous urban policies to achieve sustainability, a view shared by the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report III: Mitigation of Climate Change (Babiker et al., 2022). 

Launched in September 2021, the EU Mission for 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities (“Cities Mission”), which is interlinked with the EU’s Green Deal, focuses on innovation and experimentation to enable all European cities to become climate-neutral by 2050. As part of the holistic initiative (Shabb et al., 2022), more than 100 Mission Cities, of which 12 are in non-EU countries, have pledged to significantly reduce their carbon emissions and become smart hubs by 2030. The ultimate goal is “to enable all European cities to follow suit by 2050” (Christidis et al., 2024, p.107) and thereby reshape the EU’s urban landscape. Participating cities face the enormous challenge of addressing the complexities of contemporary urban life by setting goals and targets, ensuring stakeholder involvement, and developing an action plan that details strategies and responsibilities (Salvia et al., 2023). Technology aims to create more efficient, healthier, and sustainable urban environments. For this, however, there is no “one size fits all” solution (Christidis et al., 2023) to achieve climate neutrality and simultaneously transform a city into a smart city.

Figure 3: Zurich, Switzerland, is consistently ranked as the top smart city in the world by the IMD Smart City Index report (CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, 2016).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions have been implemented as part of each of the 112 Mission Cities’ action plan — a Climate City Contract (CCC) — to analyse, identify, monitor, and track the infrastructural challenges. These challenges include transportation and energy systems, waste management, and air quality (Ulpiani et al., 2023; Christidis et al., 2024; Komninos & Panori, 2025), which are all vulnerable and contributing to climate change. The Cities Mission highlights the global increase in “urban experimentation” (Shabb et al., 2022, quoted in Salvia et al., 2023) to make cities smarter and safer. The initiative accelerates the development of smart cities in the EU, but the prevalence of AI and IoT technologies in urban centres means most major cities around the world will gradually adopt smart city principles and fundamentals in their drive for efficiency and sustainability.

Ethical Considerations of Smart Cities

The geographical concentration of skilled and innovative people has accelerated the design and implementation of digital and smart solutions to enhance productivity and economic development. The rise of smart cities represents the bold adoption of technology in the future of urban planning and governance. However, while the implementation and integration of AI and IoT have created an intelligent or smart urban environment (Jacques et al., 2024a), which in IBM’s vision is the core 3Is of “instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent” (Elmaghraby & Losavio, 2014, quoted in Braun et al., 2018), data collection raises concerns about privacy and cybersecurity risks (Fabrègue & Bogoni, 2023; Johnson, 2023). Limited engagement creates insecurity and affects the public’s acceptance of how their data will be used and shared by the IoT, a network of devices connected by sensors and cloud technology (Jacobs et al., 2020). The lack of transparency can undermine public trust and hamper support for new technologies and future initiatives.

Smart cities have the potential to transform communities and neighbourhoods into sustainable and healthier environments for all residents. Yet, the implementation of interconnected digital technology to achieve economic and social goals can result in furthering urban inequalities by creating a “digital redlining” (Sanders & Scanlon, 2021; Foley et al., 2022), defined as a “gap between people who can easily use and access technology, and those who cannot” (West, 2011, quoted in Sanders & Scanlon, 2021). This gap in access to affordable information technology, training opportunities, and digital skills development, for example, is attributed by digital privacy and surveillance expert Dr. Chris Gilliard (2019), quoted in Skinner et al. (2023, p.3), to “discriminatory practices against already marginalized groups” which can be based on ethnicity, income, and race (Brewer et al., 2020). These exclusionary practices also include the intentional failure of service providers to maintain and upgrade digital infrastructure in poorer communities, thereby reinforcing the “class boundaries” highlighted by Dr. Gilliard, which limit opportunities and advancement in education and employment.

Figure 4: The interconnected components of a smart city aim to improve urban sustainability and efficiency (Bouramdane, 2023).

The plethora of data collected by smart cities monitors the environment (water and air quality, for example), infrastructure, surveillance, and transportation systems (Al Nuaimi, 2015; Salman & Hasar, 2023) to improve the efficiency and health of urban life. While Johnson (2023), for the US think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), downplays privacy concerns, claiming that smart cities technologies “do not collect any data on residents’ individual behavior or activities”, many researchers disagree. Several scholars (Braun et al., 2018; Andrew et al., 2023; Jin & Wang 2025) have raised concerns over individual privacy and protection from real-time “big data” collection (Mark & Anya, 2019) — such as surveillance (Geeli et al., 2024) and public transportation usage (Kitchin, 2016) — by emerging and unaccountable “surveillance capitalists” (Zuboff, 2019, quoted in Andrew et al., 2023) i.e. multinational technology companies.

Furthermore, the rapid expansion of publicly and privately owned technology devices and software has also increased the opportunities for poorly secured and maintained systems to be exposed to cyberattacks and data breaches. As smart city systems manage everyday, vital infrastructure and services by interconnected systems using AI and IoT, there is an urgent need for awareness, investment, and research in robust “cyber resilience” to counteract increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Cyberattacks, be they “availability attacks” (to close down a system), “confidentiality attacks” (to extract information), or “integrity attacks”  (to manipulate a system’s settings) (Dodge & Kitchin, 2018), target specific weaknesses in a system and can be launched “from anywhere and at any time” (Kimani et al., 2019), which can spread across entire networks, even if one device is targeted.

The Future

While cities are actively pursuing smart city initiatives and projects to address unprecedented social, infrastructural, and environmental challenges by technological and participatory endeavours, their development remains uneven in Europe and across the rest of the world (Correia et al., 2022, p.1793; UN-Habitat, 2024). In the EU, despite a drive for standardisation across the region to remove technical obstacles and encourage innovation, variations in implementation have been attributed to differences in levels of regional economic development, government planning, and public participation (Garcia-Fuentes et al., 2019; Pašalić et al., 2021; Pricope et al., 2023). The cost of digital technologies — supplied by private interests — has also been found to favour richer sections of society, raising issues regarding equality and fairness of this initiative (Bihr, 2020).

As the capabilities of AI and IoT technologies rapidly expand and develop, the concerns of growing “big data” collections by multinational corporations will continue to pose serious challenges to the human rights of individual privacy and security and, in doing so, challenge the role of governments to provide accountability and transparency for all citizens.

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