Local governments are increasingly committed to user-centric digital services and recognise their benefits for local people, businesses and society. To help cities make user involvement an integral part of digital local government and give local people a more prominent role in developing public services, UserCentriCities was born. This project, which runs from December 2020 to May 2023, supports municipalities to use co-creation in service design and adopt an iterative approach to service delivery that considers people’s needs. Many cities have a digital strategy that is less than three years old according to results gathered by the project, making this an area in which increased city-to-city exchanges can prove invaluable.

To protect digital rights and fight the digital divide, cities need mechanisms, structures, and clear digital rights strategies. Only a handful of local authorities have formal service standards for user-centric service design. And while many local authorities have issued design guidelines for making user-centricity happen, many lack the essential monitoring and enforcement tools to assess their implementation. To track these processes, UserCentriCitie has created a dashboard that will continue to add cities and regions’ systems.

Data is a basis for our future cities, as it will support a better understanding of our local environments, informing the development of effective policies and efficient delivery of services. For example, mobility data could help avoid urban congestion, and combining building information models with energy consumption data contributes to building local solar communities.

Successfully leveraging the potential of data, however, depends on effectively collecting, accessing, and using data from various sources and owners. For example, cities advocate the development of scenarios in which data held by businesses, such transport or energy data, can be accessed by public authorities not just for public emergencies. Such data is essential for delivering public services, simulating policy interventions and shaping public spaces. The Data Act proposed by the European Commission in February 2022 represents a significant opportunity to support Business-to-Government data sharing, providing conditions for public sector bodies to access data held by private entities.

In support of solid data governance in Europe that includes cities, the European Commission adopted, in December 2022, an implementing act on high-value data sets (open data and publicly available datasets), offering cities access to high-value datasets from other public sector organisations. Additionally, the Data Governance Act provides a framework to clarify the roles and responsibilities of different actors in data sharing ecosystems.

Although a harmonised European framework for access to and re-use of data might be beneficial for local governments, the value of data will only be unlocked if collaborations arise in which data on several levels and from various sources flows freely and where value is distributed fairly.

To unlock the value of all this data, artificial intelligence is frequently applied to process and analyse the information. The increased use of advanced algorithmic systems and AI has a growing impact on society. Cities advocate for a broad definition of AI systems with comprehensive and appropriate regulation, while also calling for precise requirements on the obligations and responsibilities of AI users and providers.

As such, the European proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act is very relevant for cities. This proposal was initially adopted by the Commission in April 2021, adopted by the European Parliament in May 2023. Depending on the risk classification of an algorithmic system, cities, as users of applications leveraging AI, will have obligations and responsibilities according to the proposal.

Taking a lead on this European legislation, Barcelona, Bologna, Brussels Capital Region, Eindhoven, Mannheim, Rotterdam, and Sofia – based on the example set by Amsterdam and Helsinki – have developed a free-to-use, open-source ‘data schema’ for algorithm registers in cities, published in January 2023. This algorithm transparency standard provides common guidelines for cities to publish information about the algorithms that they use and what choices have been made in their development. Transparency supported by local algorithm registers empowers local people and puts them at the heart of future developments in digital transformation.