Smart City as a national task
Smaller municipalities often struggle to digitise their structures. How can the federal and state governments support them? Money alone is not enough, according to the conclusion of a discussion panel
A panel guest speaks to a packed audience about digitalisation, data infrastructures and the challenges facing smaller municipalities. Photo: Messe Berlin
Not everyone can be Hanover. Within a year, the capital of Lower Saxony catapulted itself up 34 places in Bitkom's ‘Smart City Index’ to the top ten. ‘A year ago, there were only three cities that were worse than us, now there are only six cities ahead of us,’ said Mayor Belit Onay on the panel ‘Smart City as a State Task.’ Getting there was ‘not always a linear and successful process’. But with the establishment of a digitalisation department, agile methods and a task force that consistently reviewed administrative processes, the city equipped itself to become the digital climber of the year.
A question of clout
The city has also benefited from federal funding programmes, said Onay. Without these, such innovative processes would not be possible. Now Hanover has a digital twin that can be used for a variety of simulations – and the state capital has the clout to continue on its digital path in the long term. However, smaller municipalities are not in a position to do this, said Onay, who is also Deputy President of the German Association of Cities. They need a perspective: what form should support from the federal and state governments take – not only financially, but also in terms of making solutions available to everyone at a reasonable cost.
The best approach is to simply purchase data infrastructures
Sabine Meigel, Head of the Office for Digitalisation and IT for the City of Konstanz, has a clear vision: she would like cities to no longer have to develop their own data infrastructures, but instead be able to purchase them as data platforms – ‘just as we purchase SAP financial systems for our authorities’. Without this data infrastructure, ‘we will not be able to deal with AI in local authorities,’ she said, adding that given the financial difficulties at local authority level, it will be very difficult in the coming years anyway.
Economically efficient
Ernst Bürger, State Secretary and IT Commissioner for the State of Brandenburg, said that he did not consider it economically wise for every small municipality to digitise its processes on its own: in his state, ‘we have many small municipalities that have neither the money nor the capacity to do so’. For him, this means that there must be more coordinated cloud infrastructures and platforms with their own standards that every municipality can use. The state of Brandenburg has therefore decided to offer a roll-in service that provides municipalities with complete project management from a single source.
In order to roll out smart city projects across the board, it is important that both the step-by-step plan and the planned competence centre are implemented – despite the tense financial situation, added CDU Member of the Bundestag Lars Rohwer. The Bundestag must ‘fight hard for the 2026 budget’ so that the digitisation of administration can be implemented across all structures. ‘Citizens expect to be able to do things from their smartphones. They expect it to work. And they are right to expect that.’