A TU Munich Study Shows German Smart Cities Are Smarter on Paper Than in Practice

 

A recent study in npj Urban Sustainability analysed 61 smart city strategy documents from major German cities against 30 criteria for sustainable-digital transformation, sorting them into front-runners, middle range, and laggards. The result should make urban technocrats rather mercilessly uncomfortable: everyone has learned to say “sustainability”; far fewer have learned to build it into strategy. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-026-00418-w

What separates the front-runners is not the digital vocabulary, the dashboards, or the ritual invocation of sensors that consultants bill by the hour. It is governance: alignment with supra-regional policy frameworks, citizen participation that is institutionalized rather than decorative, and impact measurement built into the strategy itself — so that when promises fail, the failure has an address before the next press release, not just another invoice in disguise.

The most revealing finding lies in the regression analysis. Population size? Not significant. Economic development? Not significant. Political composition of the city council? Not significant. The only factor positively associated with an integrated strategy was participation in the smart city funding programme — external money arriving with conditions and reporting obligations. Cities did not do better because they were big, rich or governed by the “right” party. They did better when someone upstream forced them to think before they spent.

Yes, the study scores documents, not outcomes. That makes the result worse, not better: these are the cities’ self-portraits, written with every incentive to flatter, and many still could not fake coherence. A city does not become smart by collecting data, any more than a university becomes excellent by collecting rankings. It becomes smarter when digitalization is forced to serve social justice, ecological responsibility and democratic accountability. Strip that away, and the “smart city” is the most expensive euphemism urban marketing invented.

P.S. - But perhaps Germany is not the scandal here. Perhaps Germany is the warning. If this happens with a national Smart City Charter, federal funding and a reputation for administrative seriousness, imagine what the same audit — if anyone dared to run it — would find where "smart city" is just a password for EU money — and no one checks the work.

A Universidade que premeia quem sempre se cala e castiga quem ainda ousa pensar

Depois de dois posts anteriores com títulos tão pouco equívocos como um publicado no dia 25 de Maio, “A quem interessa fabricar uma Academia que ladra baixinho e nunca morde?”, que se tornou o 5.º mais visualizado nos últimos trinta dias, ou um outro, publicado no dia 29 de Maio, que conseguiu tornar-se muito rapidamente o 2.º mais visualizado no mesmo período, sobre “A extraordinária falta de vergonha de uma conhecida universidade pública”, é quase reconfortante porém nada surpreendente ler, na primeira semana de Junho, um artigo da revista Sábado intitulado “O medo na academia, o espelho do país”.

O autor escreve sobre uma academia asfixiante, onde a crítica deixou de ser entendida como dever intelectual e passou a ser tratada como delito disciplinar informal. Um espaço onde quem ousa discordar arrisca isolamento, o silêncio administrativo, a exclusão de redes, o bloqueio de oportunidades e outras formas higiénicas de punição institucional, discreta, eficaz, cobarde, rotineira, silenciosa e exemplar que raramente deixam impressões digitais.

Mas o ponto mais inquietante suscitado pelo artigo é outro: este medo não fica fechado dentro das universidades. Transborda para a sociedade. Quando os académicos se calam por receio de represálias, os cidadãos percebem que até aqueles que deveriam pensar livremente aprenderam a falar em voz baixa. E quando a inteligência pública se ajoelha diante do medo disciplinador, a confiança nas instituições não pode senão apodrecer.

Não admira por isso que numa lista dos países cujos cidadãos mais confiam nas instituições públicas, Portugal nem sequer consegue aparecer entre os 20 primeiros colocados. Afinal, que confiança merecem as instituições públicas se até a academia que devia vigiá-las e expor os seus abusos se domesticou ao ponto de transformar a autocensura em método, o silêncio em carreira e a cobardia em prudência institucional, respeitável e conveniente?

PS - É curioso, ou talvez apenas deprimente, ver como o tema não envelhece. Há cinco anos questionei: "Como pode a Universidade interpelar a sociedade se os próprios professores têm medo de falar?". Cinco anos depois, a pergunta morreu de excesso de evidência. O medo deixou de ser sintoma para ser regime. A liberdade académica continua lá, claro — embalsamada com todas as honras, nos regulamentos, nos discursos solenes, e nas cerimónias oficiais. Existe onde não incomoda. Onde seria necessária, faz-se cadáver.

Climate Apartheid and the Cruel Shadow Line of Segregation Across European Cities

https://shop.elsevier.com/books/eco-efficient-materials-for-reducing-cooling-needs-in-buildings-and-construction/pacheco-torgal/978-0-12-820791-8

As my colleagues and I prepare the new edition of Eco-efficient Materials for Reducing Cooling Needs in Buildings and Construction (linked above), the heat dome that suffocated Europe in late May 2026 made clear: cooling can no longer be dismissed as a footnote to the climate crisis. It is becoming a precondition for survival, dignity, social equality and ordinary urban life in increasingly overheated cities. Portugal registered a May temperature record of 40.3 °C in Mora, while France endured its hottest May day ever recorded — midsummer arriving weeks too early on a continent warming more than twice as fast as the global average.

A recent study reveals what this overheating actually does to urban life across different social groups. Writing in PNAS Nexus, researchers analysed mobile-phone mobility data covering 13 million people, providing an unusually large-scale picture of how extreme heat alters everyday movement and activity. They found that mobility falls by up to 10% on hot days and by as much as 20% on hot afternoons, precisely when exposure becomes most dangerous and the need for effective cooling becomes most urgent.https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/4/pgag078/8651395

Predictably, the burden is not shared equally. Older adults retreat most sharply from daily life, while lower-income people remain more exposed because avoiding work is a privilege they cannot afford. Social mixing declines and activity drains from city centres. Extreme heat does not merely raise electricity bills or mortality figures; it quietly turns cities into places where normal life becomes increasingly reserved for those with the resources to escape indoors.

The conclusion should now be impossible to avoid: cooling is no longer a matter of comfort, architectural refinement or reduced energy consumption. It is about whether people can still work, move, meet and inhabit their cities as Europe rapidly, relentlessly and dangerously overheats — and whether the poorest will once again be forced to pay the highest price. Eco-efficient cooling materials are no longer a niche energy-saving solution. They are part of the basic infrastructure required to prevent liveable cities from becoming a climatic privilege.

PS - The brutal truth behind all this is simple: when a city begins to divide between those who can buy their way into cooled interiors and those condemned to endure the street, the bus stop, the workplace and the overheated flat, we are no longer merely describing a heatwave. We are watching segregation being modernised quietly, brutally, and in plain sight — drawn no longer on maps, but on overheated bodies and homes, in poverty-weighted degrees Celsius.