The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and UN-Habitat issued the United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) Toolbox for People-Centred Smart Cities in the AI Era at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, according to ITU’s 6 November 2026 announcement. ITU, the UN agency for digital technologies, calls it the UN’s first system-wide AI governance toolbox for smart cities. It gives mayors, city managers and policymakers guidance on using AI in public services, including when to decide against its use.
Key points
- ITU and UN-Habitat issued the U4SSC toolbox for mayors, city managers and policymakers.
- Its four rules cover the urban problem, human control, safeguards proportionate to impact and the option not to use AI.
- SmartCitiesWorld published its account on 4 November; ITU’s announcement is dated 6 November.
- The release coincides with U4SSC’s tenth anniversary and a series of related publications.
Four U4SSC rules for city decisions
ITU said it announced the toolbox at the United Nations Pavilion hosted by ITU and UN-Habitat at the Barcelona event. SmartCitiesWorld published its account on 4 November 2026. ITU’s release is dated 6 November 2026. The toolbox sits within U4SSC, a UN initiative launched in 2016 to develop practical resources for cities undertaking digital transformation.
ITU sets out four rules for officials considering an AI project. They should start with the problem facing the city, rather than with a technology they want to deploy. Public decisions should remain under meaningful human control. Safeguards should become stronger as an application’s potential impact grows. Officials should also treat a decision not to use an AI system as a responsible possible outcome. These are directions for choosing and managing applications, rather than an instruction to put AI into every service.
The questions ITU associates with the toolbox run through a project’s life: whom it might help or harm, how the city should monitor it, who is accountable for decisions made with it, and when the city should change course or stop. ITU says the guidance draws on smart-city solutions from Helsinki in Finland to eThekwini in South Africa. Those places are presented as sources of practical experience, alongside questions intended for officials making their own deployment decisions.
City halls already use chatbots to answer residents and algorithms to select roads for repair, according to ITU. The agency also points to software used in administrative decisions, and identifies bias, privacy, human rights and accountability as risks associated with these applications. For a city weighing an automated decision about a public service, the toolbox’s starting point is therefore the service and the people affected by it. Its human-control rule applies to the public decision, not merely to the choice of software.
ITU and UN-Habitat focus on residents
Doreen Bogdan-Martin, ITU Secretary-General, said the toolbox was intended to help officials turn international standards and responsible-AI principles into guidance for public services. Anacláudia Rossbach, UN-Habitat’s Executive Director, placed particular emphasis on communities in informal settlements and other underserved areas. She called for cities to address gaps in data, protect human rights and give residents and civil society a meaningful part in shaping urban decisions. UN-Habitat is the UN entity responsible for sustainable urbanisation and runs programmes in more than 90 countries.
Those concerns arise at a point when public bodies are considering more uses for AI in urban services. AI Affairs has reported that the UAE announced an annual $1 million AI prize for urban services. The U4SSC guidance addresses an earlier choice for any city considering such an application: whether the proposed system responds to an identified urban problem, and what its effects could be on the people whose services it changes.
U4SSC marks ten years with more guidance
ITU and UN-Habitat coordinate U4SSC with the UN Economic Commission for Europe, with support from 19 other UN agencies and programmes. ITU describes it as a platform for collaboration that develops tools to help cities with sustainable digital transformation. The toolbox’s release marks ten years since the initiative began. It gives city leaders and practitioners a common set of questions to use across the life of a project, from choosing an application to monitoring it and deciding whether to continue.
Alongside the toolbox, U4SSC is releasing publications on urban AI governance, measurement of people-centred digital transformation and security for digital public infrastructure, ITU said. The series also covers city data platforms, anticipatory governance and data-enabled destination management. ITU presents these resources as references for city and national authorities working with AI and data.
