Service
Digital Urban Transformation and Research
Overview
Smart Cities are not technology projects; they are governance and transformation projects shaped by digital capability.
Jochen Rabe served as Professor for Urban Resilience and Digitalisation at the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF), TU Berlin — Berlin’s interdisciplinary excellence research cluster — and continues to contribute as a Research Associate. He also served as Managing Director of the Competence Center for Water Berlin (KWB), where he established and led the Smart City department. During this period, he guided major research and implementation initiatives, including contributions to Germany’s €860 million federal programme Model Projects Smart Cities.
Building on this experience, RSUP advises federal ministries, municipalities and major private sector actors on the strategic design, governance and scaling of urban digital transformation — ensuring that digital systems strengthen institutional capacity, infrastructure performance and long-term public value.
Approach
Our advisory work operates at the interface of digital transformation, public governance and long-term state capacity.
We do not frame Smart City agendas as technology deployment programmes. Instead, we support ministries and public authorities in defining the strategic purpose, regulatory architecture and institutional design required for sustainable digital transformation.
Key questions include: How can digitalisation strengthen public sector capability and strategic autonomy? Which governance and data frameworks ensure accountability, interoperability and long-term adaptability? How should funding programmes be structured to enable scalable transformation rather than fragmented pilot projects? How can digital infrastructures align with national policy priorities, resilience objectives and fiscal responsibility?
Using foresight methodologies, policy diagnostics and systemic analysis, we develop strategic frameworks that connect digital capability with infrastructure systems, environmental goals and socio-economic development.
Our role is to provide structured guidance at programme and policy level — enabling governments to move from experimentation toward coherent, institutionally embedded digital transformation.
Outcomes
Our work strengthens the strategic and institutional foundations of public-sector digital transformation.
We support ministries and federal agencies in establishing coherent digital policy frameworks that align innovation with regulatory clarity, fiscal responsibility and long-term public value. Rather than isolated pilot initiatives, the result is structured transformation anchored in governance capability.
Our advisory delivers across several key dimensions:
National and Federal Digital Frameworks: Development of strategic roadmaps and policy architectures that connect digital infrastructure, data governance and public-sector reform.
Programme Design and Evaluation: Structuring funding programmes and assessment frameworks to ensure scalability, interoperability and measurable systemic impact.
Institutional Capacity Building: Clarifying organisational roles, competencies and coordination mechanisms required for durable digital transformation.
Data Governance and Regulatory Alignment: Design of governance models that balance innovation, accountability, security and democratic oversight.
Critical Infrastructure Digitalisation: Strategic guidance for AI-enabled and data-driven infrastructure systems that improve performance while safeguarding resilience and public control.
The outcome is not simply digital modernisation, but enhanced state capability: institutions equipped to govern complexity, manage technological change and maintain strategic agency in an evolving digital landscape.
