When I teach Sustainability and Digital Transformation to my MSc students in London, I always try to make concrete examples that could help them better understand the theory taught.
My favourite thematic example is Smart Cities where several skills need to be gathered when a regular/traditional city intends to become “smart”.
Technical skills: to complete this transition, a city has to install a number of sensors in several services (e.g. transport, air quality measurement, energy distribution (i.e. smart grids), governance and health services, infrastructures, etc.. These sensors must be able to continuously and promptly communicate data acquired, so an efficient and reliable coverage of wired and wireless Internet should also be available. All this huge amount of data will be conveyed to a control centre where data duly processed and elaborated will generate several decision-making scenarios. All this is carried out to make better use of existing resources (e.g. roads, means of transport, energy hubs, hospitals, parks, etc.) and consequently make that city a better place to live
Training skills: all the operators involved in the tens of areas mentioned above (in a simplified way, of course) must have attended exhaustive training course before joining these posts. This is not the end of the process, but just the beginning: with all new technologies coming up on the market so fast, they should attend periodical training courses in order to be able to use all new digital tools effectively
Economic/Financial skills: the process for a city to become smart implies the allocation of financial resources to buy, install, use and maintain all the ICT-/AI-based systems. This will also imply some important decisions to take at the beginning of the journey whose the most important are: should the city buy or rent the systems? Should the package include or exclude maintenance? Should all the systems be bought by the same vendor (I don’t mention anyone, but the reader can think of at least a couple of global companies)? Either answer to the last question has consequences: if they say “yes”, then the city will be fully serviced but entirely tied to that vendor whereas if the say “no”, they will have the freedom of buying the best products from different vendors but then they will need to have a “dashboard” managing several pieces of hardware and software that may not be fully compatible one with the other and subject to different maintenance contracts.
Still under this group of skills, accurate calculations to understand when the cost of installing smart systems will be paid back with tangible improvements of air quality, livability, sustainability, should be carried out.
Legal/laws compliance skills: managing a city in these days is much more complicated than a few decades ago. There are several laws to comply with regarding the environment, data privacy, systems reliability (which is not only technical), etc..That’s why we often read “data is collected in aggregated way” to avoid some systems (or someone in particular) able to identify an individual. This includes, for example, surveillance images (for example, those taken on board public transport vehicles to prevent or prosecute criminal actions) that should be deleted as soon as no crime has been reported.
Low urban air quality could trigger fines from governments or the European Commission for EU countries; that’s why cities think about some countermeasures to reduce pollution in their territories. This implies that daily measurements of air quality in the city should be reliable, as anticipated before.
What we still miss in our cities, though, is a serious approach to making our cities greener. As we have experienced during this Summer 2026, European cities have suffered multiple heatwaves that dramatically reduced the urban livability. Some cities installed climate shelters (or adapted existing places such as museums to the scope) but we need a more organic approach to this issue as, unfortunately, Climate Change is here to stay for a long time.
We then need a 5th group of skills: Sustainability/Climate Adaptation & Resilience aiming to plan ahead and implement structured solutions that could help reduce Summer temperatures in cities while increasing the quality of life of their citizens and visitors.
Stefano Mainero
EPN Consulting and EPN Consulting Research and Innovation Founder & CEO
This article was written by human beings without any use of AI whereas graphics displayed may have been generated by AI tools. EPN Consulting Ltd. copyright 2026
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