In the last few years, the role of municipalities and sub-national authorities has received increasing interest and recognition, especially at the European level. Events such as the EU Week of Regions and Cities, and the rise of networks like Eurocities, showcase that politics and governance are complex practices and are not limited to national governments. Moreover, given their direct contact with citizens, their key role in translating European frameworks into concrete solutions, and their wider flexibility in signing bilateral agreements with foreign partners (the so-called “sub-national” or “paradiplomacy”), local authorities are destined to strengthen their relevance in the European political landscape.  

While more and more Member States claim for increased national sovereignty, municipalities have the potential to enhance (instead of hindering) the process of European integration. If this is the case for climate – as Eurocities advocates –, it is even more so for the disruptive digital transformation that the European Union is pushing for through the EU Digital Decade, open data initiatives, data standards, and interoperability measures.  

Indeed, it is time to translate high-level legal frameworks into concrete actions to face concrete challenges. Efficiency, cost-savings, health-services customisation, urban planning, transparency of governance, pollution and sustainability issues: all these policy areas can be remarkably improved by a data-driven approach. And the more granular and localised these actions are, the more impactful they will be. 

The Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI) project was launched by the European Commission precisely with this scope in mind. It offers public administration teams a comprehensive environment for modelling, testing, and deriving insights from open data. On the one hand, by leveraging BDTI’s ready-to-use analytics tools and data environments, public sector bodies can conduct analysis and testing without requiring extensive technical resources or significant infrastructure investments. Moreover, BDTI’s infrastructure for flexible data processing analytics enables public administrations to handle large or small datasets, facilitating real-time policy simulations and impact assessments.  

Specific implementations are discussed in BDTI Skills Studio, a series of workshops designed for public sector actors who want to learn how to use data to improve public services. In each workshop, data experts build unique fictional use cases from scratch and provide attendees with slides and code so that they can replicate the steps in their own time. For instance, the latest workshops took place on 6th  and 20th November.

In the first case, attendees learnt how to use historical climate data to classify and predict future outcomes through the example of the Tourism Climate Index (TCI). Whereas, the second saw participants getting hands-on experience on the best strategies to forecast bicycle traffic in Paris, following the whole process from analysing historical data to visualising forecasted and real-time data. Moreover, the final workshop – dedicated to Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques - will be held online on 11th December, 2024, and will focus on extracting insights from large-scale surveys that use free-form answers in part of their questions. 

Meanwhile, BDTI supported various local authorities in their journey towards data-driven decision making, as witnessed by BDTI pilots and success stories. The city of Turku (Finland) is processing traffic data and data about bus routes and stops to determine the most suitable places for dedicated bus lanes and assess their impact on the traffic flow and the bus connection speed.

 Naples (Italy) is redesigning its public spaces through citizen participation and sustainable mobility planning to pursue social inclusion and equity. The pilot leverages urban data and citizen opinions to identify hubs where people can rest and seek protection during extreme climate events.  

Speaking of public health, the city of Valencia (Spain) tackled the COVID-19 pandemics by performing a systematic review of scientific clinical articles to provide clinicians and managers with advanced data visualisation tools.  Meanwhile,  Bochum (Germany) developed an open-source machine learning model for predicting tree health from resistivity readings. The objective is to improve sustainability indicators through informed decision-making and the deployment of customised public interventions.  

These goals were achieved because BDTI tools consist of scalable environments for data processing, machine learning, and advanced analytics that enable public administrations to handle datasets without major IT investments. These solutions also foster collaboration between public actors, as witnessed by the pilot on Digitalising EU Public Procurement, that was realised thanks to a joint venture between Italy, Portugal, and Norway.  

If your municipality is struggling to translate open data into concrete implementation, BDTI resources and workshops will help you overcome the technical barriers that stand in the way of effective policy-making. Discover our BDTI Skills Studio past sessions and register to the upcoming ones to get some hands-on experience with the analytics tools and data environments, receive expert guidance in data modelling and testing, and harness opportunities for networking and collaboration with peers.