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Interview: Ugo Valenti, Director of Smart City Expo World Congress

27 September 2018

This year’s theme is ‘Cities to Live In’. Are we experiencing a paradigm shift in the main focus of smart city initiatives?

Absolutely. It is no secret that when the concept of the smart city was coined it had an enormous focus on the deployment of ICT infrastructure and sensors and the development of new digital platforms to monitor urban environments. Now, new solutions have enabled us to manage mobility, energy consumption, urbanism, economy and information in a radically different manner and have also made it possible to take a new step further. Metropolises are run and inhabited by people, these citizens are indeed the lifeblood of cities themselves and we need to put them in the centre of every initiative, project and solution. We need to make cities better places to live, work and play.

What changes or new additions will delegates see at this year’s edition?

They’ll be part of our biggest edition with up to 20,000 attendees and more than 700 exhibitors expected, as well as a reshaped conference structure specially designed to go deep on the most critical urban challenges. This year, Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) will focus on five main topics: Digital Transformation, Urban Environment, Mobility, Inclusive & Sharing Cities, and Governance & Finance. But we will also host a series of side events or co-organised events that will reflect this paradigm shift toward more collaborative cities.

For the first time the Sharing Cities Summit will take place the day before SCEWC, and there will be dedicated spaces at the Congress for ‘Inclusive and Sharing Cities’. What will this bring to SCEWC 2018?

This will align the show and its physical spaces with what we believe is the main goal of smart urban transformation. Recent studies by companies and foundations such as Gartner and Nesta have concluded that the initiatives that do not have people at their very centre tend to fail and that successful smart cities will inevitably need to combine the best aspects of technology infrastructure while making the most of the growing potential of ‘collaborative technologies’ that enable greater collaboration between urban communities and between citizens and city governments. We want to reflect this on every space and theme of this edition and the Sharing Cities Summit as well as another event we will make public very soon will strengthen this stance.

Why should private sector and public sector officials attend?

The main reason for everyone involved in the urban sphere to attend is that Smart City Expo World Congress is the leading international event on smart cities and smart urban solutions. But over the past years it has actually become something more than just a trade show and congress. Barcelona and our event have become the place where cities, companies and experts in the urban field meet every year to share their initiatives, the results of their projects and together devise ways to tackle every challenge facing cities regardless of the location or type of metropolis they represent. It is the one place where knowledge, business and alliances are made.

This is the eighth SCEWC to be held, where do you see the potential and growth for future editions?

We’ve seen many projects by now but the real challenge is scaling up and tailoring solutions to every city’s needs and characteristics. Just as an example let me say that while Western European countries and the United States have been pioneering smart cities for over two decades now, Asia registers the largest spending in smart technologies. According to Frost & Sullivan, the total spending on IoT in the Asia Pacific region was US$10 billion in 2014 and that figure will rise to US$59 billion by 2020.

That said we are not only interested in business. At Smart City Expo World Congress, we feel proud to make our contribution to a worldwide joint effort to make our planet a better place for everyone. To do so we need tools but also forums where every actor involved in this endeavour is able to contribute and learn, to rebuild and transform. That is what we are trying to do in Barcelona: share and work to create better cities, smarter cities, cities to live in.

 

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