The Smart City Expo in Barcelona is an exciting and expansive event. Compared with the Stockholm Smart City Expo I attended in 2023 and 2024, the Barcelona conference is much larger and far more international. Delegations came from across the Americas, Asia and the Arab world. Many exhibitors joined forces country-by-country or with neighboring nations to form joint booths on the trade show floor.
Few sensors and devices — emphasis on shared challenges
Beyond the exhibition floor there were several large stages hosting panels and presentations. Unfortunately, the main stages often remained superficial: much of what was said was generic and rarely dug into practical lessons or concrete solutions. The unofficial stages and smaller sessions proved more interesting, frequently presenting specific solutions and deeper discussions.
One clear observation was the relative scarcity of actual sensors and gadgets on display. Instead, cities and larger organizations dominated, focusing on projects and common problems rather than hardware. AI had a strong presence, but there should be a greater focus on how IoT data can enrich machine learning models, not just on how AI enables IoT functionality.
Hard to demonstrate measurable impacts
A prominent insight is that IoT adoption and the smart city concept are now global movements — not limited to a handful of cities or regions. Many participants described ongoing pilots and the difficulty of scaling and coordinating the collected data. There is a desire to obtain a cohesive view of all initiatives across a city or region, but achieving that is complicated by the many systems, organizations and stakeholders that must collaborate. This fragmentation creates inertia that several people expressed frustration about. Many also noted they still cannot point to clear, measurable effects — concrete business cases remain rare.
Questions asked of the cities
I used the same set of questions I have asked in previous years:
- What are your most successful IoT or smart city solutions?
- What effects have you achieved?
- Have you measured those effects, and do you have figures?
- What are your biggest challenges now and over the next 1–2 years?
How the cities responded
Below is a selection of cities that participated in the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona 2024 and the key takeaways from each delegation.
Bordeaux Métropole
Bordeaux Métropole is an administrative region in France encompassing 28 municipalities. They use IoT primarily for facilities maintenance, for example at sports venues. Efforts are still siloed — individual applications in different areas — and no city-wide platform or shared IoT network has been implemented. Vertical solutions remain the norm rather than a unified approach.
Smart Dublin
Dublin has made strong progress with weather stations and sensors for flood detection and life-saving equipment. For instance, sensor monitoring of life buoys has enabled the city to eliminate the need for five full-time positions previously tasked with manual checks. Climate-related initiatives are prioritized, including monitoring inside low-emission zones.
When procuring solutions, four local authorities joined forces but procured four separate systems rather than a single one. Each council trialed a different solution and later evaluated results. If one solution proved superior, the other councils could switch to it without initiating a new procurement process. This approach reduces the risk of being locked into a single choice. Suppliers that committed to iterative collaboration rather than delivering a fixed “out-of-the-box” product performed better and were more likely to be retained.
Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe in Germany is building a LoRaWAN network and measuring parameters such as moisture levels in trees. While they have dashboards that display incoming data, they do not yet have measurable impact figures. Upcoming challenges include financing, resources, and information and cybersecurity. There are motivated people involved, but no consolidated network for sharing data. It is unclear who owns which sensors, and many departments do not communicate, creating a need for greater transparency.
Tianjin
In Tianjin, China, IoT is used extensively for transport, including speed and traffic monitoring. The city implements Green Wave systems that coordinate traffic lights across multiple intersections to optimize flow, minimizing braking and acceleration events and reducing idle time for vehicles.
City of Pilsen
Pilsen, Czechia, focuses on traffic management, safety, LoRaWAN networks, water leak detection, air quality and road icing. They deploy 4,000 water sensors to detect leaks and employ additional sensors to monitor CO2 and particulate levels. AI is used for forecasting. Beyond IoT, Pilsen faces demographic challenges as people move to larger cities or abroad. To retain residents, the city invests in entrepreneurship education from a young age, supports innovation through hackathons and startup assistance, and encourages opportunities that help young people build careers locally.
Rome
Rome has a smart city roadmap that begins with communication infrastructure, investing heavily in 5G and WiFi rollouts. Future priorities include waste management, mobility and public safety. For waste, Rome plans demand-driven collection — empty bins only when full instead of fixed schedules. For traffic, the deployment of 2,000 high-resolution 5G cameras combined with machine learning aims to reduce congestion through predictive traffic patterns and increase safety by monitoring crowded areas. The largest hurdles identified are, in order: funding — skills — culture.
Smart City Berlin
Berlin runs a collaborative initiative called Gemeinsam Digital. One project, Kiezbox 2.0, deploys solar- and battery-powered boxes that create a mesh network to provide WiFi to critical staff and the public during emergencies. These boxes also collect environmental data — temperature, air quality and noise — which can be shared via LoRaWAN for public use or by local actors.
Another project, SmartWater, supports planning for blue-green infrastructure to prepare for climate change and to warn residents about heavy rainfall. Concrete measures include a digital planning tool for urban planners focused on blue-green infrastructure, a web application to visualize its components and benefits, and a digital communication concept for flood risk during heavy rains. Establishing the collaboration took roughly two years; the group is now implementing these projects.
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden works on a mobility project called DIGI-V that uses cameras and sensors to power dynamic traffic signs and inform optimal routes. Cameras and sensors mounted on traffic lights along main streets also collect environmental and pollution data. All information is aggregated in a single platform to enable future traffic adjustments. The city aims to prevent stakeholders from deploying incompatible sensors that fail to integrate with the broader system, and it emphasizes consolidation for a unified overview. The three biggest challenges identified are leadership, communication and politics.
Seongnam
Seongnam in South Korea began IoT initiatives in 2009 and measures water and air quality at selected sites. The city has built a digital twin to simulate river flooding hour by hour, enabling better emergency planning. Seongnam also pilots drone deliveries of food and medical supplies in a central park. A looming challenge is coordinating the many departments and agencies that must collaborate for smart city solutions to succeed.
Liverpool city region
The Liverpool city region monitors air pollution across the area and conducts both broad and high-precision measurements in collaboration with universities. The region is testing hydrogen buses and measuring whether air quality changes near monitoring stations when those buses pass. Past initiatives tried to count people passing certain streets using sensors in shop windows — either vision-based counters or devices detecting WiFi-enabled units like phones. A major challenge is achieving an overview and central control of all city sensors, especially when many are operated by partners such as shop owners. Sensor quality varied, and devices were moved or reoriented during shop refits, undermining data consistency and reliability.
Smart City Busan
Busan’s Eco Delta City district offers a different innovation model: it is a living testbed where companies pilot products and services with a real population. Residents effectively become trial participants. For example, Busan tested sensor-based evacuation procedures for earthquakes. A recurring problem across cities is the variety of data formats, platform models and structures. Each city or district uses its own approach, making interoperability and data sharing difficult.
Malaysia, Smart City Alliance
Although no Malaysian city had a standalone booth, I spoke with a representative familiar with multiple initiatives in the country. Malaysia focuses on geospatial monitoring — detecting landslides near railways and monitoring other critical infrastructure — and systems for managing parking. Municipalities often buy inexpensive sensors and end up with siloed, incompatible data because each local authority uses different solutions.
To assess technological maturity, Malaysia has introduced a tiered scale for cities. Only a few municipalities have reached the higher tiers so far, but the scale gives cities a way to measure and compare their progress. A standardized global maturity model for IoT and smart cities would simplify comparisons and reduce redundancy — and might have made this report shorter.
Finally, I learned that Southeast Asia’s first smart city expo will take place next year and Malaysia will host. Look out for that event in September 2025.