The smart, resilient city starts with a digital water strategy

The first session, held on June 24, opened this dialogue with a compelling exchange between Cecilia Correia, Global Water Industry Solutions Strategist at Bentley Systems, and Andre Salcedo, independent consultant and former CEO of Sabesp, Brazil’s largest water utility. Moderated by Cristina Novo, Technical Editor at Smart Water Magazine, the conversation combined technology and public policy, long-term strategy and on-the-ground reality.

From planning to performance: putting water at the center

Cecilia Correia opened by reframing the purpose of smart water infrastructure. Digital tools, she argued, must go beyond operational optimization. They must guide strategic decisions, align stakeholders, and increase the city’s capacity to adapt. “We need to shift from infrastructure designed for the past, to infrastructure designed for uncertainty,” she said.

For Bentley, digital twins — enriched with SCADA, GIS, sensor and climate data — offer a living model of the city’s water system, enabling cross-departmental collaboration and proactive asset management. These models are not simply technical platforms; they serve as shared languages between utilities, planners, engineers, and policymakers.

Andre Salcedo brought the utility perspective, grounded in the complexity of managing water for over 20 million people in the São Paulo metro area. He explained that resilience cannot be delivered without coordination. In his experience, data integration, transparency, and clear performance contracts were critical tools to ensure long-term water security in a region with water availability comparable to desert conditions.

Integration as a foundation for smart utilities

One of the strongest themes to emerge from the session was the need for cooperation among utilities. Andre Salcedo described the fragmentation that exists when water, gas, power, and telecom companies plan their work separately. The result: overlapping excavations, redundant investments, and citizen disruption. “Water can be the catalyst,” he argued, “but the goal is integration across all infrastructure sectors — to reduce cost, improve reliability, and plan with the city as a whole.”

“Water can be the catalyst, but the goal is integration across all infrastructure sectors — to reduce cost, improve reliability, and plan with the city as a whole” — Andre Salcedo

He shared initiatives developed during his leadership at Sabesp, such as contracts that required utilities to share underground maps and coordinate maintenance plans, and infrastructure designs that allowed multiple services to share the same trench. For Salcedo, true smart cities begin with this kind of governance innovation as much as with digital tools.

Cecilia Correia agreed, highlighting how Bentley’s technology is being used to support precisely this kind of alignment in other parts of the world. She cited examples from New York, Asia, and Europe, where utilities are using digital twins and operational intelligence to manage water loss, optimize pumping schedules, and design adaptive systems. “Our way to look into the future is to actually live with the water,” she said.

Andre Salcedo was especially critical of the conventional approach to city planning, in which utilities intervene reactively and often in isolation. He described cases where water companies, energy providers and telecoms dig and redig the same roads due to poor coordination. “When we don’t plan together, it’s simply not smart,” he said, calling for a shift from fragmented interventions to co-designed urban development where underground infrastructure is treated as shared civic space.

Urban intelligence begins underground

Andre Salcedo reminded the audience that in the case of water, the smart layer starts below ground. “It’s not easy to implement smart systems on assets that have been in place for decades — even centuries,” he said. In Sabesp, the digitalization strategy began at treatment plants, where automation and monitoring were easiest to deploy. From there, it expanded to main pipelines and eventually to the last mile of the distribution and sewage collection systems.

This phased approach prioritized cost-efficiency and long-term gains. Andre Salcedo described how automating pumping schedules helped reduce both energy consumption and water loss. He noted that smart infrastructure must be aligned with the physical and financial realities of utilities, especially in high-density environments like São Paulo.

Measuring what matters: data, contracts, and accountability

Both speakers agreed that digital transformation is only as effective as the institutional frameworks that support it. Andre Salcedo explained that in Brazil, utilities must align with municipal and state governments through well-structured contracts. “If you’re not efficient, you’ll be a burden to the treasury,” he said. That’s why Sabesp rewrote its service contracts to include KPIs for water losses, service quality, and transparency with regulators.

“Technology alone doesn’t solve the problem. It’s how you use it to make better decisions” — Cecilia Correia

Cecilia Correia added that the real challenge is turning data into shared understanding — and then into action. From water quality to climate adaptation, “technology alone doesn’t solve the problem. It’s how you use it to make better decisions.” She also stressed the importance of addressing workforce aging and technical capacity through digital tools that empower rather than overwhelm.

Andre Salcedo also described how combining rainfall and temperature data provided reliable forecasts for consumption patterns in São Paulo. “When you combine data from rain and temperature in Brazil, it is a very good predictor of water consumption,” he explained. This allowed Sabesp to anticipate demand peaks, optimize reservoir use, and plan interventions with greater precision.

Editorial closing: resilience is designed — and it starts with water

This first episode of the Smart Water Cities Webinar Series offered more than insight into tools and projects. It revealed a fundamental truth: resilient cities are not built by chance — they are designed. And that design must start with water, not as a passive utility, but as a strategic driver of urban functionality, equity, and climate preparedness.

As Cecilia Correia reminded the audience, “We really need to embrace this. Embrace uncertainty. Exactly. Adapt.” For cities to achieve that, they will need governance models that prioritize integration, contracts that reward resilience, and technologies that turn data into decisions.

The series continues in July and September, with new sessions on digital stormwater management and the future of smart utilities. But the direction is already clear: in tomorrow’s cities, water resilience begins with a digital strategy and responsible governance — and the time to build it is now.

This first session also made clear is that the water sector — with its unique challenges and cross-cutting relevance — can lead the way in defining how smart cities are built: not around technology alone, but around shared responsibility, resilience, and long-term vision.