Academicians from 4EU+ discussed smart cities at the Faculty of Law in Prague.

On October 11, 2024, the Prague Department of Administrative Law organised the 2nd round table from the Lectures in Modern Administrative Law series. While in October 2023, attention was paid to regulatory sandboxes, this October, the concept of smart cities became the subject of discussion. The round table was realised in two panels. At the very beginning, Prof. Gherardo Carullo (University of Milan) gave a presentation on the work and other plans of the academic group Venice Network on Smart Cities and Digital Administration. His speech was followed by several presentations dedicated to cross-cutting topics related to the implementation of various smart city functionalities - for example, the use of artificial intelligence in spatial planning (Prof. Julio Ponce Sole, University of Barcelona) and smart energy solutions for the new generation of cities (Alessia Monica and Leonardo Scuto, University of Milan and Lucie Vosečková, Charles University).

The second panel was devoted to practical demonstrations of how the smart city concept is implemented in different parts of Europe. Examples from Sweden (Prof. Henrik Wenander, University of Lund), Italy (Corso Tozzi Martelli, University of Milan) and Switzerland (Marc-Olivier Busslinger, University of Geneva) were presented here. Our law faculty was represented in this section by Christopher De La Cruz, who presented a report on the implementation of smart city concepts in Prague, and Liliia Serhiichuk, who presented the state of digitalisation in the city of Kyiv in her paper. Alice Nováková, who is writing her diploma thesis on smart cities at the Department of Administrative Law and is currently studying as part of the Erasmus+ program in Thessaloniki, Greece, presented this metropolis as a smart city in her contribution.

The Department of Administrative Law organised the round table as part of the 4 EU+ mini-grant solution, Charting the course towards a new legal framework for smart cities. As part of the successfully established cooperation between the Prague and Milan Departments of Administrative Law, the written versions of the papers presented will be published in a special issue of the Milan journal CERIDAP, which is indexed in Scopus.