Smart Strategy Development
Co-Designing Holistic Digital Strategies for Resilient, Inclusive, and Future-Ready Cities
We provide consultancy services to towns and cities developing smart city and digital strategies, ensuring a structured and effective approach to digital transformation.
Our approach helps local governments, their partners, and communities to co-design holistic, long-term strategies that improve efficiency, sustainability, and resilience while enhancing everyday life for residents.
By 'holistic', we mean that these strategies cover a comprehensive set of thematic areas (see the list on the right, or underneath if you're reading this on a mobile screen). These areas are often either not considered in a strategic context, or are treated individually and isolated from each other - however a truly mature smart city is able to combine them and achieve multiple outcomes simultaneously, and for this they need to be appropriately integrated.
Our primary focus is on identifying gaps in existing strategies and enhancing collaboration through co-design and co-management.
Thematic Integration: Building an Interconnected Strategy
A truly effective smart city strategy integrates a broad range of digital domains into a unified, context-sensitive framework. Our approach ensures these themes are not treated in isolation, but understood as interdependent levers for transformation:
Digital Public Services: Designing and delivering responsive, user-centred services across transport, housing, health, and social care.
Urban User Experience: Enhancing how people interact with the built environment, services, and systems—through data-driven design, accessibility, and continuous feedback loops.
Climate Action & Decarbonisation: Embedding digital tools and data insights to support environmental monitoring, emissions reduction, circular economy models, and climate adaptation.
Smart Buildings & Districts: Leveraging sensor networks, building automation, and performance data to optimise energy use, comfort, and operational efficiency in both public and private developments.
Smart Placemaking & Public Safety: Using digital technologies to shape safer, more engaging and inclusive public spaces, improving wayfinding, lighting, surveillance transparency, and civic trust.
Smart Procurement: Embedding innovation into procurement processes to ensure cities can effectively engage with emerging technologies and agile suppliers while ensuring transparency, fairness, and value for money.
Digital Economy & Innovation: Supporting start-ups, SMEs, and research ecosystems; enabling economic diversification through digital entrepreneurship and innovation hubs.
Sensor Networks: Designing and deploying citywide sensor infrastructures to gather real-time data on air quality, mobility, energy use, waste, noise, and more—enabling adaptive urban management.
Citywide AI Strategy: Developing responsible, cross-sector approaches to deploying artificial intelligence in areas such as transport, urban planning, social services, and environmental monitoring—grounded in transparency, accountability, and citizen rights.
Digital Rights & Privacy: Embedding citizen rights into digital policies; ensuring ethical data use, privacy, and informed consent in smart infrastructure and services.
Cybersecurity: Establishing robust policies and incident response plans to protect critical infrastructure, services, and citizen data from emerging threats.
Data Management & Publishing: Creating value from data through open standards, interoperability, and transparent governance, enabling evidence-based decision-making and innovation.
Digital Inclusion: Addressing the digital divide through inclusive design, access programs, and socio-economic support, ensuring no one is left behind in the digital transition.
Digital Skills: Building local capacity for digital literacy, civic tech participation, and workforce adaptation for the evolving digital economy.
Digital Connectivity: Improving broadband infrastructure, mobile coverage, and IoT networks to ensure seamless access to digital services across urban and rural areas.
Public Engagement: Enabling participatory platforms, inclusive co-design, and meaningful civic dialogue that informs digital priorities and builds trust.
eGovernment & Smart Governance: Building agile, transparent, and adaptive institutions capable of governing digital transformation responsibly and inclusively.
Each of these elements contributes to a coherent strategy that reflects the city’s unique assets, challenges, and ambitions—and ensures that technological innovation serves the public good.
Participatory Methodologies and Theory of Change
We apply a participatory design process rooted in the Theory of Change framework. This proven model enables stakeholders to co-develop a shared vision of long-term outcomes and work backward to identify required actions, policies, and investments.
Through this process, we facilitate:
Shared Visioning: Stakeholders articulate a common future scenario grounded in local values and aspirations.
Outcome Mapping: Clear identification of desired outcomes, challenges, enablers, and potential risks.
Backcasting: Developing pathways from the long-term vision back to present-day actions.
Action Planning: A prioritised roadmap of short-, medium-, and long-term interventions, policies, and initiatives.
This model supports collaboration between departments, aligns public-private-community interests, and helps avoid fragmented or siloed digital efforts.
Why a Holistic Smart City Strategy?
As digital technologies proliferate and upend how cities operate and service their citizens, holistic smart city strategies are becoming an essential tools for addressing complex urban challenges in a coordinated and inclusive way. By integrating the technological, social, environmental, and economic dimensions of digital transformation, cities can:
Improve outcomes, even in the short term.
Future-proof infrastructure and services.
Build local digital capability and economic activity.
Support inclusive digital participation.
Strengthen democratic governance and combat misinformation.
Improve service delivery, efficiency, and responsiveness.
Enhance quality of life and social cohesion.
Our consultancy process is designed to bring representatives from all stakeholder groups — public sector, private sector, civil society, academia, and citizens — into strategic dialogue, enabling shared understanding, ownership, and accountability.
Who We Work With
We work directly with:
Municipal and regional governments.
Local digital and innovation teams.
Urban development agencies.
Public utilities and infrastructure operators.
Community organisations and citizen networks.
International development and donor agencies.
Whether starting from scratch or refining an existing strategy portfolio, we adapt to your context and capacity to deliver meaningful, lasting change.
Typical Phases of Engagement
Our consultancy support typically follows a five-phase process, with flexibility to adapt to local needs and levels of maturity:
Discovery & Assessment
Stakeholder & asset mapping.
Baseline review of digital maturity and capabilities.
Gap analysis against ISO standards and other frameworks.
Vision & Co-Design
Multi-stakeholder workshops.
Theory of Change process.
Agreement on long-term outcomes and priorities.
Strategic Development
Drafting of holistic strategy and integration of key domains.
Benchmarking against ISO 37122 and 37123 indicators.
Alignment with pre-existing goals, SDGs, national strategies, and legal frameworks.
Implementation Roadmapping
Action plan with timelines, budgets, and KPIs.
Governance and delivery structures.
Capacity building and skills development plans.
Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning
KPI dashboard design.
Continuous learning mechanisms.
Strategy update processes and resilience planning.