Smart City Expo Readies its Fifth Edition With Big Focus on Mobility
A bumper attendance by city officials from around the world is expected as top urban experts, among them Harvard professor Edward L. Glaeser and Ushahidi.com co-founder Juliana Rotich, address key technology and economic issues.
This is the fifth edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress and we have many new exciting things. For starters, this year we will host a number of side events, among them a special symposium on the Circular Economy that has the support of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and an Entrepreneurship convention hosted by the Mobile World Capital Barcelona’s 4YFN (Four Years From Now) programme.
Attendees this year will see a special focus on transportation. If there is one single issue that every city in the world needs to address it is transportation, and this year Smart City Expo will host a special Smart Mobility area which will hold its own conference programme and will have the railway industry as one of the key actors.
We will be hearing a lot about new mobility paradigms, self-driving vehicles which will actually be showcased at the venue, and the role of the train industry. Drones and their diverse use in urban environments will also be addressed in a major way. And our Call for Apps registered the best result ever, so we will be seeing some amazing urban apps.
The crossroads between public and private sectors will also be a focus, particularly Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), which I’m sure will be very helpful and engaging for both private sector and public sector officials
The forecasts for the Expo this year are great, even though last year’s results with 11,000 visitors, 275 exhibitors, and 400 cities were already excellent. Forecasts put us around 450 exhibitors, and probably more than 500 cities attendees.
It is important for city leaders to attend because when we talk about smart cities we are basically talking about making cities better. Smart City Expo World Congress is committed to transforming the way cities work and how they manage their resources to become more sustainable, but also more livable for their citizens. I think such commitment to economic and environmental sustainability and making places better where people can live better is widely shared by city leaders across the globe. And the best place to find new solutions and learn from others’ experiences and initiatives is in Barcelona.
In fact, we will have several mayors attending from different parts of the world and even the Indian urban development minister will attend Smart city Expo World Congress to explain their Delhi-Mumbai corridor Project which will require the creation of a hundred new cities and will be meeting companies at the show and city representatives.
We will also have the biggest and best list of urban speakers gathered so far, over 400. Among our keynote speakers are Edward L. Glaeser — probably the world’s top expert in the economy of cities; Beth Simone Noveck, director of the Governance Lab, who served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative; Pankaj Ghemawat, world renowned economist who has intensely studied and argued about globalization and to what extent cross-border differences still matter in the world; and Juliana Rotich, co-founder of Ushahidi.com, a website that has used the power of the internet to uncover violence by crowdsourcing information about crisis areas and collating it into live, online maps that have helped in Kenya, Congo, Haiti and Chile.
Smart City Expo Readies its Fifth Edition With Big Focus on Mobility
