Global Resources and Promising Practices for Building and Refining Accessible and Inclusive Smart Cities from Darren Bates LLC.
Highest Ranked Smart Cities of 2018-19 Eden Strategy Institute and OXD (ONG&ONG Experience Design) have come up with the top 50 smart cities of 2018-19. According to Eden Strategy Institute, this is one-of-its-kind independent ranking conducted for the first time that takes into consideration the roles that city governments play in leading a smart city strategy. The research studied…
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BARCELONA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – In the fashionable Poblenou district of Barcelona, hipsters and entrepreneurs rub shoulders with homeless people and immigrants, as the city authorities try to reduce digital inequality. The futuristic Media-TIC building is one of several venues around the city where disadvantaged people can sign up for free courses to improve their online literacy skills under a…
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e may have reached peak ‘smart city’. This trend depends on the continued densification of global urban areas and the exponential penetration of the internet into industries that were previously isolated from digitization. To see the peak in person, it’s best to get a glimpse at the Smart Cities World Congress in Barcelona; an event that brings together 17,000 people from around the world including 600 municipal leaders and over 500 international exhibitors.
At Urban-X, we see a new model for engineering the city as a service emerging; one in which top-down planning meets with bottoms-up participation and design that integrates people, businesses, buildings and other infrastructure. Open data and platforms that encourage creativity and economic vitality are a defining characteristic of the cities we want to live in.
The key to facing the climate crisis, security vulnerabilities and rapid urbanization is real citizen engagement and collaboration between the public and private sector. Startups have an important role to play, but the true economic potential of this space won’t be fully unlocked until we get good policy change and business model innovation from large companies.
Here are ten key takeaways from the Smart City World Congress in Barcelona that inform our path forward:
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Barcelona is acclaimed as one of the leading Smart Cities in the world, with studies such as those by Juniper Research, as well as the Hong Kong government, corroborating this statement. However, it begs the question – how did Barcelona manage to do this, and can their methods be replicated in other cities or locales, such as Malaysia?
In pursuit of these answers, the SITEC Media team managed to catch Maria Sisternas, CEO of Mediaurban, a Barcelona-based content creation agency that specialises in urban and smart technology solutions to answer these questions.
According to Sisternas, Barcelona believes strongly in citizen engagement, as well as cooperation between the private and public sector — the city is investing a large amount of money towards finding out what their citizens think about their projects….