Leipzig, Lüderitz and ISCN talk about Data That Shapes Cities at Dataweek 2025

Smart City projects aspire to make our lived realities more efficient and sustainable. And these very goals can also be directed at smart city projects themselves. There is an increasing body of resources and technology available to achieve “more smart city” with less input, e.g. through Digital Public Goods. And a very good way to investigate this is through exchanges and collaborations across borders. 

It is with such a theme that the International Smart Cities Network (ISCN) set up a session with Leipzig and Lüderitz to pose the question how cities and rural communities worldwide can kick-start Smart City use cases. 
First, Enoh Tabak from the ISCN gave a little keynote, starting with observations on patterns in the emerging Data Ecosystems and reflected them against the “leapfrogging” phenomenon in low-income regions, where sometimes entire development steps could be skipped thanks to most recent technology. The question followed: Is “leapfrogging” also possible for smart city projects and applications? 

Probably not as straightforwardly as with cases in consumer markets such as telecommunication or energy supply. Here, individual customers can just “vote with their feet” and opt for the latest product offer, e.g. the mobile phone instead of the landline, and thus collectively reshape services and markets. In the smart city realm, however, the subject is often not individuals but cities and its different stakeholder groups. There is a higher need for coordination and the question of what entails a proper “service delivery” is conceptually thicker and ambiguous.

Nonetheless, there is increasingly possibilities to replace or complement traditional ways of recording data with exciting new means. Instead of human resources or even specialized sensors, AI models can analyze a stream of simple imagery (computer vision) and achieve similar detections at a fraction of the cost.

After these theoretical reflections, the keynote turned to an overview of some publicly available datasets that can be employed from everywhere with just an internet connection (see following table and download).

 

From this international perspective Christoph Schubert of the Digital City Department from the city of Leipzig took over and offered a brief overview of the smart city activities in Leipzig, notably the CUT project (Connected Urban Twins). Within the funding programme for Model Projects Smart City (MPSC), Leipzig developed a range of workflows, applications, software and knowledge transfer formats, from renewable energy dashboards, to urban analytics on optimal locations for kindergartens to urban data platforms and IoT prototyping platforms. 

Enter Lüderitz, Namibia. The town is expected to have rapid urban growth over the next years stemming from big investments for hydrogen production and exports, supported by the German Federal Government. In order to tackle the big urban planning challenges that arise from that, Leipzig and Lüderitz began a smart city exchange on which Beate Ginzel from the Digital City Department from the city of Leipzig, and Phillippus Albertus Balhao, the Mayor of Lüderitz, shared some first impressions. 
Mayor Albertus Balhao described how the planners in Lüderitz’ administration feel already enabled with the opportunities to test and leverage tools such as the IoT prototyping platform and GIS environments. And Beate Ginzel highlighted how Leipzig benefits from such external replications and validations of their developments as it can highlight opportunities for valuable updates and resiliences. 
A conclusion drawn in the session was that there is already a lot of resources out there to be combined into great projects for smarter and more liveable cities. Bringing together globally available data sources and the open source software and hardware from various repositories or which is shared by other municipalities can yield great results and even leapfrogging opportunities for many corners in the world.
 

Want to know more about the presented information or get into touch with the involved parties? Contact us via iscn@giz.de 

The full recording of the session can be watched below, starting at the respective timestamp (04:47:24 )