National Strategy for Smart Territories: from strategy to action with João Roque Fernandes
João Roque Fernandes discusses the challenges, priorities, and impact of the National Strategy for Smart Territories.
João Roque Fernandes is a Member of the Board of Directors at AMA – Agency for Administrative Modernisation, where he has been leading key projects for the digital transformation of public administration in Portugal. In this conversation, held during the 3rd International Conference on Public Policy and Data Science on 20 May 2025, he highlighted the importance of the National Strategy for Smart Territories as a catalyst for building a true Smart Nation.
The interview explores the main challenges of data management at the municipal level – from the need to collect large-scale information to its transformation into actionable knowledge for more effective public policy. João Roque Fernandes stressed that a truly smart territory is one that serves its people – a place where technology and data work invisibly to remove barriers and foster quality of life, inclusion, and well-being.
“A smart territory is one that serves its people.”
UW: What role does the National Strategy for Smart Territories play in the creation of smart cities and the effective use of data at both local and central levels?
JRF: I came here above all to explain what the National Strategy for Smart Territories is. To give both perspectives we have, that is, a more operational view of how we believe the strategy should be structured in order to achieve the objectives, with the ultimate goal being to have a smart nation, a country that is truly able to generate a high volume of data. Above all, what this strategy aims to do is to obtain lots of data, lots of information, and ensure that this information is used both by local public administration and central public administration.
Above all, the major challenge is to fund as many proposals as possible. And in that regard, I also had the opportunity to mention the figures we’ve seen within this strategy, which have been very telling of the success we are managing to achieve.
We’ll have a large part of the country covered with sensors and urban management systems. And I believe the big challenge will then be to go beyond that. That is, once we have all the data available, the question is how do we turn this into useful information, information that allows us to define better public policies and better planned actions. There, I think the challenges will vary from one Municipality to another, because some municipalities have far more experience than others and more information as well.
But above all, I believe the goal is to break down barriers. First, to access information; then, to have the systems that allow us to work with that information and, above all, that later allow us to define policies, to run simulations of those policies, to understand on the ground, locally, the real impact of those measures. To be able, in a predictive way, in those simulations, to get a result that is closer to what the reality is and will be, as opposed to what we have nowadays, which is not data-based and often relies heavily on perceptions, leading to policies that don’t have the expected impact in the end, as they should.
UW: Based on your experience at AMA – Agency for Administrative Modernisation, how would you define a smart territory?
JRF: Above all, I believe a smart territory is one that serves its people and allows them to enjoy better urbanism and better quality of life. Professor Miguel Castro Neto mentioned in one of his talks that the goal of the city is to be transparent, and I believe that a good smart city, ultimately, should be just that.
That is, the city serves people to such an extent that it becomes almost invisible, the person moves through the city, or rather, through the territory with all the conditions in place, without facing barriers. Often, the barriers created within cities, whether architectural, functional, public transport, parking, urban mobility, healthcare, even public safety – a smart city ensures the convergence of all these factors for the ultimate wellbeing of the person, of those living in or moving through the city.
