Belgium

The official list of regional powers runs from “transport (except Belgian Railways)” and energy to “town and country planning” and the “supervision of the provinces, communes and intercommunal utility companies”. The Communities hold education and “the use of languages”. A city’s levers therefore sit mostly one level up:

• Broadband: telecoms are federal, overseen by BIPT, and private operators build. No city lays fibre, but Flemish cities co-own a network: their utility, Fluvius, holds 33.2% of Wyre. Wallonia asked towns in its 2023 smart-region call to give up taxes on masts and antennas.
• Public transport: the Regions run it through De Lijn in Flanders, LETEC in Wallonia and STIB in Brussels; rail is federal. Cities control their own local roads.
• Clean air: the Regions write the rules for low-emission zones. Flanders set a stricter 2026 stage for its two zones, then cancelled it, and gave the cities more say over individual exemptions.
• Policing and cameras: policing is organised by federal law on two levels, a federal police and about 180 local police zones run by the mayors of the towns they cover; the interior minister wants about 60. Cities buy number-plate cameras for clean-air zones or speed checks, and since July 2025 these can feed one national police platform.
• Energy and heat: energy is regional, nuclear power and the high-voltage grid federal. Fluvius, wholly owned by the Flemish cities and municipalities, runs electricity, gas, street lighting, sewers and heat networks.
• Planning: each Region has its own planning law, so a building rule that works in Ghent cannot simply be copied in Liège.
• Open data: each level legislates for its own bodies. Flemish councils must publish their decisions and other documents as linked open data, which people and search engines can reuse.
• Online services and e-ID: the federal level issues the identity card and runs MyGov.be, each Region and Community builds its own portals, and the most used login, itsme, is private.
• Procurement: one federal law of 2016 applies at every level. The Regions push reuse through grants; Flanders’ 2025 City of Things call wants solutions that other cities and municipalities can use.
• Skills: schools belong to the Communities and inclusion schemes to the Regions, while towns and local partners host the help desks.

The split favours Flemish cities where the Region hands them a duty with a shared standard, as with council decisions, or where they own the asset, as with Fluvius. It works against them where the Region keeps the dial. Ghent’s mobility alderman, Filip Watteeuw of the Flemish greens, Groen, still sees “polluting De Lijn buses” in a city with a clean-air zone. Size is a regional choice too: Flanders took over €273m of debt to merge 28 municipalities into 13 in 2025.

Around the cities sit their associations: the VVSG in Flanders, the UVCW in Wallonia and Brulocalis in Brussels. Flemish councils also share IT work and purchasing through V-ICT-OR. imec, the Flemish research centre for digital technology, and the VUB-SMIT media institute supply much of the research. Public power over the networks sits in shareholdings rather than statutes: the Flemish municipalities own Fluvius, and through it a third of Wyre, the federal investment company owns a fifth of itsme, and the federal State is Proximus’s largest shareholder. Watching them are Bond Beter Leefmilieu, the Flemish environmental federation, and Klimaatzaak, the citizens’ group that won the climate case on appeal.

Organisation in focus

IMEC

Creates nanoelectronics and digital tech driving global smart city infrastructure and innovation.

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Organisation in focus

Vrije Universiteit Brussel - SMIT Research

Researches societal impacts of digital tech, shaping smart city policy and innovation.

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Bart De Wever of the N-VA has led the federal government since February 2025, a five-party coalition nicknamed “Arizona”. In July 2026 it approved a Federal Digital Agency inside FPS BOSA, the federal support service, proposed by the digital minister, Vanessa Matz of the francophone centrist Les Engagés; no budget has been published. For cities the Regions matter more. Flanders’ Minister-President, Matthias Diependaele (N-VA), keeps digitalisation himself. In Wallonia it belongs to Pierre-Yves Jeholet of the francophone liberal MR, who in June 2025 put the Agence du Numérique at the centre of the Region’s digital policy. Local government answers to Hilde Crevits (CD&V) in Flanders and François Desquesnes (Les Engagés) in Wallonia. The capital waited longest: the Brussels-Capital Region went 613 days without a government, until February 2026.

Flanders has built the most machinery for reuse. Its Vlaanderen Radicaal Digitaal programme aimed in 2016 to digitise all public services by 2020, with €10m a year to back projects, according to VUB-SMIT; no published evaluation says whether it did. City of Things began as a living lab of Antwerp, the Region and imec, into which Flanders put €4m a year. It became a grant line: the 2025 call offers up to €2m a project, four-fifths of it subsidised, for solutions other councils can reuse. Ghent signed up to several bids, one of them extending a shared website platform built by Kortrijk and its intermunicipal company, Leiedal.

Wallonia’s first Smart Region call, in 2019, drew 88 bids from towns and intermunicipal companies and produced 35 finished projects. The second, worth €3.1m, was built for transfer: it offered 70% of a project’s cost, up to €200,000, for replicating, improving or scaling existing smart projects, the first call’s 35 included. Neither its winners nor any evaluation of what spread have been published that we could find.

From our library

Circulaire — second appel à projets « Territoire intelligent / Smart Région » (Gouvernement wallon, Plan de relance, 2023)

Wallonia’s second smart-region call, built to replicate the first call’s projects.

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From our library

Dix motivations qui poussent les communes wallonnes à porter des projets smart city. Analyse empirique de l'appel à projets « Territoire Intelligent » (Heynen, Guarino, Esposito — ULiège, 2021)

Why Walloon towns bid for smart-city money: an analysis of 88 projects.

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Belgium’s EU recovery plan is worth €5.3bn, 27% of it for digital aims, including €448m to digitise administration, justice and health. In July 2026 the Commission approved the fifth payment request; once it is paid, Belgium will have received €3.86bn, 73% of the plan. In September the federal cabinet approved the final request. Four Belgian places joined the EU mission for climate-neutral and smart cities in 2022.

The sharpest argument is over who may loosen a clean-air rule. Antwerp opened Belgium’s first low-emission zone in 2017, and Ghent followed. Stricter rules were due in both from January 2026, which would have banned diesel cars of the Euro 5 standard. In November 2025 the Flemish government cancelled them, against the advice of the Council of State, the top administrative court, and two months after the Constitutional Court had suspended Brussels’ postponement of its own tightening on the right to health. It promised an evaluation in 2027. Ghent’s own coalition will scrap its zone if the evaluation cannot prove its value, though it brings in about €1m a year. Wallonia had already dropped, in 2024, its plan to make the whole Region a zone from 2025.

Surveillance is the other argument. In November 2024 the VTC, the Flemish supervisor for data protection in public bodies, warned Flemish cities and municipalities about number-plate cameras. They are often installed first, it wrote, with their purposes decided afterwards and a legal basis sought last. The federal coalition agreement opens the door to police facial recognition to trace convicts and suspects, which no specific law yet covers. In 2021 the interior minister, Annelies Verlinden, said federal police had used Clearview AI, a use she called illegal under Belgian law.

From our library

Richtlijn en waarschuwing ANPR-camera's en trajectcontroles voor steden en gemeenten (Vlaamse Toezichtcommissie, 2023–2024)

The Flemish supervisor’s guideline and warning to municipalities about number-plate cameras.

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Leuven’s circulation plan of 2016 split the centre into five sectors around a car-free core, so cars could no longer cross town inside the ring road. A year on, cycling in the centre was up 32%, on the ring road 9%, and bus ridership 12%. The plan was drawn on streets the city controls. Ghent followed in April 2017, and the City of Brussels did the same in its central Pentagone district in August 2022, under the Region’s Good Move plan.

Ghent’s plan is the better measured. The Flemish environment agency measured air quality at 20 points before and after. By the mobility alderman’s account, nitrogen dioxide fell by almost a fifth on average, and by up to 30% in places. A 2017–2020 evaluation by Transport & Mobility Leuven, a consultancy, found access on foot, by bike and by public transport clearly better, and access by car differently organised but of similar quality. Both plans remain in force.

ANPR@GPI, the national platform for number-plate cameras, came from a city. Bernard Quintin, the federal interior minister, says it was developed by the Antwerp police with the federal police. Live since mid-July 2025, it shows officers a plate’s recent locations, and each search must state a reason. Belgium had about 4,500 such cameras in 2023, 3,650 of them in Flanders, and the aim is a “shield” of 10,000.

Fluvius, the company the cities own, fitted the digital meters the Flemish government ordered across every Flemish city at once. By February 2025 it had fitted 4.4 million electricity and gas meters, in almost 7 of 10 homes and small businesses, and 742,000 households followed their use online. In 2021 the Constitutional Court struck down the Flemish promise of net metering, and about 101,000 solar-panel owners who already had the meter lost the guarantee they had been given.

Liège’s tram took the Walloon route: the Region’s transport authority ordered it through a public-private partnership. It opened in April 2025, two and a half years late. Counted as investment it cost €430m, of which €380m is repaid to the consortium Tram’Ardent in quarterly fees until 2052. La Libre gave €1.173bn as the latest estimate of the whole budget. In its first year it carried 12 million passengers and reliability rose from 95% to 97%, but 17% of riders did not pay, against about 4% on De Lijn. The extensions to Herstal and Seraing have been cancelled.

Leuven was also the first Belgian city to receive the EU mission label for its climate contract, in March 2024. The contract says its breakthrough projects can cut the city’s emissions by about 10%, and only scaling them up would make 80% possible. Antwerp holds the label too; the Brussels-Capital Region and La Louvière, Wallonia’s only mission city, which submitted its contract in 2024, are not on the 2026 list.

In the IMD Smart City Index, a survey of how residents see their own city, Belgium’s only entry is the capital, 59th of 148. Among 17 cities in Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium, its residents are among the most positive about their online ID services, and the least convinced that they can see or shape what their local government decides.

What happens to a city’s idea at its Region depends on who holds the lever. A plan drawn on a city’s own streets went from Leuven to Ghent in a year and, inside the Region’s own mobility plan, to the heart of Brussels. Antwerp’s sensor lab became Flanders’ grant line for solutions other councils can reuse. Clean-air zones, whose rules Flanders writes, were frozen by Flanders, and Wallonia dropped its own before it began. Antwerp’s number-plate software went past the Region altogether, to the federal police, and is now the national platform.