The increasing growth and availability of municipal data sets represents a significant opportunity for municipalities and their citizens to develop tools for coping with these problems, especially in newly urbanising countries where new sources of digital data can both help to make sense of changing needs and demographics, and can enable interactive urban planning and governance. These new sources of data are already the subject of interest and experiment.

Ex ante impact assessment can take place also in more traditional ways. But there needs to be true political will.

The use of big data and related analytics tools and services has necessarily to be accompanied by appropriate regulatory measures.