Smart Cities Dive
Smart Cities Dive is a Washington, District of Columbia-based online news publication covering how cities use technology, infrastructure and policy to improve urban life. Published by Industry Dive, now part of Informa TechTarget, it reports on urban innovation, transit, energy, buildings, waste and digital services for city leaders, planners and the companies that work with them. Its website is smartcitiesdive.com, and its core product is an email newsletter. The publication was launched in April 2017, when Industry Dive brought together the teams behind several of its infrastructure titles to cover what it saw as twin challenges of the era: rapid urbanisation and sustainability. Nearly a decade on, it remains the group's dedicated window on the future of cities.
Launched in April 2017 as a Weekly Publication
Industry Dive announced Smart Cities Dive on April 6, 2017. The announcement began with the scale of the moment — one of the biggest spells of urbanisation in history, arriving at the same time as critical environmental issues such as climate change and water pollution were coming to a head — and argued that the quality of life of billions of city dwellers would depend on how policymakers and business leaders responded. To help leaders address those issues and stay ahead of the curve, the teams behind Waste Dive, Utility Dive and Construction Dive joined together to launch the new publication. Smart Cities Dive began as a free weekly newsletter, delivered every Thursday, covering five areas: energy, green building, transportation, waste solutions and connectivity.
The site itself had a prehistory that the archive still acknowledges. Earlier material on smartcitiesdive.com came from Sustainable Cities Collective, which was relaunched as Smart Cities Dive in early 2017; legacy articles carry a notice explaining that they predate the relaunch and that some information may not have migrated. The new title therefore inherited an audience interested in urban sustainability and gave it a professional newsroom, a newsletter rhythm and the Industry Dive editorial format.
Built by the Waste, Utility and Construction Teams
The staffing of Smart Cities Dive reflected its cross-cutting subject. Kristin Musulin helped create and launch the publication in 2017, oversaw production of its daily newsletter as it developed, and directed its coverage as senior editor. Musulin had joined Industry Dive in 2015 and was the editor of Waste Dive before the launch of Smart Cities Dive. StateTech Magazine later named her to its 30 State and Local Government IT Influencer list, noting her reporting across shared and emerging mobility, civic engagement, affordable housing and economic development, and described Smart Cities Dive as one of the premier smart cities news websites. She was also selected for the Poynter Institute's Leadership Academy for Women in Media in 2019 and spoke regularly on journalism and city topics.
That a waste editor became the founding editor of a cities title was logical. Cities are systems, and the Dive portfolio already covered several of their subsystems — power, water and waste, buildings and roads. Smart Cities Dive's job was to cover the connections between them and the governments making decisions across all of them at once.
The Publisher: Industry Dive and Informa
Industry Dive was formed in January 2012 in Washington, D.C., by Sean Griffey, Eli Dickinson and Ryan Willumson, who had previously helped build FierceMarkets, an online and email newsletter publisher acquired by Questex Media in 2008. Its model — separate publications for defined professional audiences, free newsletters, mobile-first websites, and advertising and marketing revenue — made it profitable from 2013 and supported steady expansion through the decade. Falfurrias Capital Partners took a majority stake in 2019, and in 2022 Informa acquired that majority stake for about $525 million in enterprise value, when Industry Dive had more than $100 million in annual revenue, about 380 employees and more than 100 editorial staff, and was reaching nearly 13 million decision-makers through more than two dozen publications. Smart Cities Dive continued under Informa and later as part of Informa TechTarget. The Washington headquarters is significant for this title in particular: federal policy, national municipal associations and many of the technology and infrastructure firms shaping American cities are all part of the capital's working landscape.
Who Smart Cities Dive Serves
Smart Cities Dive is written for the leadership layer of urban change: mayors' offices and city managers, transportation and public works officials, sustainability and resilience officers, city information and innovation teams, urban planners, and the transit agencies, utilities and housing organisations that deliver city services. Its other natural audience is the private sector around them — mobility companies, energy and building technology providers, engineering and construction firms, data and software companies, and consultants and investors working in urban markets. The publication's descriptions summarise its remit as reporting on urban innovation, transit, infrastructure and technology for city leaders and planners.
The reader's problem is fragmentation. A transportation director may not follow building-energy policy; a chief information officer may not follow waste contracts; yet city strategies increasingly join these fields together, and funding programmes often require it. A single publication that reads across the silos gives its audience the connected picture that departmental sources cannot.
Coverage: Mobility and Transportation
Transportation has been one of Smart Cities Dive's defining beats since launch, when it was one of the five founding topics. Coverage follows public transit funding, ridership and service design; shared and emerging mobility, from bike and scooter systems to ride-hailing partnerships; the electrification of buses and municipal fleets; and the street-level questions of curb space, parking and safety. Musulin's own reporting specialisms — shared and emerging mobility among them — set an early pattern of treating new mobility services neither as hype nor as threat, but as services cities must integrate, regulate and pay for. Stories examine pilots and their results, the contracts behind them, and the equity questions of who new services reach and who they leave out.
Coverage: Climate, Energy and Buildings
Energy and green building were also founding topics, and climate has become the frame around much of the publication's reporting. Smart Cities Dive covers city climate plans, building performance standards, decarbonisation of municipal operations, resilience to flooding, heat and storms, and the adaptation of water and waste systems. Waste solutions — the fifth founding topic — connects the title to its Waste Dive roots, covering collection innovation, recycling markets and circular economy programmes at city scale. Connectivity, the remaining founding topic, covers broadband access, digital services for residents, municipal data programmes and the governance questions that come with sensors, cameras and connected infrastructure in public space.
Housing and economic development round out the modern beat. Affordable housing — another of Musulin's documented coverage areas — links land use, construction, finance and homelessness policy, and the publication reports on how cities attempt to add homes near transit, convert offices, and use public land and incentives to shape development. Civic engagement coverage examines how residents participate in those decisions, including digital participation tools that widened dramatically in use during and after the pandemic.
Format and Editorial Approach
Smart Cities Dive began as a Thursday weekly and developed into a daily newsletter operation, following the standard Industry Dive pattern: short Dive Brief summaries of developments, Dive Insight analysis explaining what they mean, and longer reported features. Topic pages on the website organise coverage for readers following a single field, and the publication makes use of the visual and data formats its subject invites — data visualisations and multimedia explainers have been noted as a distinctive part of its approach to complex urban questions. The site also preserves its Sustainable Cities Collective archive with clear labelling, giving readers access to a decade of earlier thinking on sustainable urbanism alongside current reporting.
The editorial stance is practical rather than utopian. Despite the futuristic connotations of the phrase smart cities, the publication's reporting concentrates on budgets, procurement, pilots that succeed or stall, and measurable outcomes for residents — ridership, emissions, housing units, response times. That grounding is what makes it useful to officials who must defend spending decisions, and it distinguishes the title from technology coverage written mainly for vendors.
Place in Urban and Municipal Media
American cities are covered by local newspapers, national urban-policy publications and a wide trade press for each municipal function. Smart Cities Dive occupies the intersection: a national, digital, newsletter-led publication written for the people who run cities and the industries that serve them, organised around innovation wherever it occurs — in a transit agency, a building code, a waste contract or a data dashboard. Launched in 2017 from the combined strengths of Waste Dive, Utility Dive and Construction Dive, and carried through Industry Dive's growth and its acquisition by Informa, it has become a standing record of how the smart cities idea matured from a technology slogan into the ordinary, difficult work of running cleaner, better connected and more liveable cities.
