Laurens Vandercruysse, Athena Christofi, Caroline Buts, Michaël Dooms, Peggy Valcke

European Procurement & Public Private Partnership Law Review, Volume 17 (2022), Issue 2, Page 81 - 93

Globally, cities are adopting smart city services processing personal data at a rapidly increasing pace. As custodians of the public interest, public spaces and fundamental rights, cities should consider the need to ensure data protection, and enable democratic oversight and accountability in their procurement processes. Traditional public procurement rarely offers the leeway to substantively tackle this challenge. However, pre-commercial procurement, which allows public sector administrators to be closely involved in the service research and development stage, and to genuinely co-create with private partners, may prevent mismatches between private sector offerings and public sector needs in smart cities. This article contrasts data protection governance in the context of traditional and pre-commercial procurement of smart city services. Through case studies, opportunities and pitfalls for public administrations are distilled. Keywords: smart cities; data protection; traditional procurement; pre-commercial procurement

Ana Lucia Jaramillo, Katerina Nikolaidou

European Procurement & Public Private Partnership Law Review, Volume 16 (2021), Issue 3, Page 220 - 228

The public sector in Europe can make use of artificial intelligence (AI) to boost its digital transformation. To improve public services in alignment with the European democratic values, principles and rights, public procurement can leverage the innovation of AI for the public good. Both AI and the Internet of Things (IoT), fueled with quality data, offer new possibilities to spark the innovative power of a city, a Smart City. The potential of AI is at the tip of our mobile phones and the connection to networks where data is shared. This can be useful to citizens and administrations, but not without challenges and risks. Therefore, this article explores what a Smart City is, and the benefits and risks of AI based solutions in the context of Innovation Procurement. It offers examples and refers to legal and ethical frameworks for the reuse of data. Keywords: data, artificial intelligence, smart cities, innovation procurement

Andrea Castelli

European Procurement & Public Private Partnership Law Review, Volume 13 (2018), Issue 3, Page 207 - 213

In the last decade, the Smart Cities debate has been characterized by a continuous and significant development, giving rise to a wide range of definitions with the purpose of identifying the exact perimeter of the phenomenon. This included determining the processes needed to transform an urban agglomeration into a ‘smart’ city through the development of new technologies and innovation with a social purpose. With the intent of pursuing those targets and creating a model of organization designed to evaluate problems linked to the environmental protection and commercial evolution (and, as a result, to increase the quality of life of people that live in it), the EU introduced a new plan of development (the Europe 2020 program) encouraging public administrations to extend the use of instruments that were already part of the European Union legal system (like the Pre-commercial Procurement, a kind of public-private partnership) and to test new ones, like innovation partnership, introduced by Directive 2014/24/EU on public procurement. This paper aims at analysing the impact of innovation partnership in the European countries, with particular reference to Italy, considering also a comparative perspective between different approaches on the evolution and development of Smart Cities. Keywords: Public procurement; Europe 2020 Strategy; Directive 2014/24/EU; Innovation partnership; Smart Cities