Smart City Expo: Top 5 topics of conversation
As thousands of delegates gather for Smart City Expo Puebla 2016, I took a look back at the topics of the conversations that we and our Microsoft CityNext solution partners had during Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) in Barcelona last November. We have summarized the top 5 in a great story-telling app called Sway. While the location for the event has moved nearly 6,000 miles, many of the challenges cities face remain the same across the globe and population growth is the common driver.
With a projected urbanization growth rate of 86 percent by 2050, Latin America’s city governments, like many others around the world, will face the issues of citizen health and well-being, public safety, education, transportation, and sustainability. These challenges of growth will, I’m sure, feature strongly in the keynote speeches at this week’s Puebla event.
Smart City Expo Puebla 2016 will hopefully build on the valuable discussions, ideas, and best-practices that took place in Barcelona. For example, MIT Senseable Lab is exploring the interfaces and interactions between urban design and technology to improve urban living at SCE in Puebla. This echoes that of Fundación Metrópoli, a Microsoft CityNext partner recognized by SCEWC as part of its 2015 Innovative Idea Award. The award acknowledges the urban “Diamond” concept used in defining the urban and territorial dimensions of issues affecting 11 major cities in the greater metro area of Bogotá, Colombia, which has a population of more than 14 million.
Following SCEWC in Barcelona, we produced a Sway as an illustrated summary consolidating the key 5 topics from the conversations with leaders and solution experts during the event:
- Digitization is at the core of any smart city’s people-first transformation, and involves the cloud, big data analytics, mobile technologies, social media and more.
- The Internet of Things is fast emerging as a key element in a growing number of smart city solutions, illustrated by the use of sensors, cameras, GPS mapping, and analytics.
- Optimal citizen and visitor experiences require cities to be safe, clean, and easy to get around in to ensure citizens want to stay and visitors come back to visit again
- A data-led approach to safer cities is helping officials to protect citizens by anticipating, preventing, and detecting criminal and terrorist activity.
- Digital equality will be critical to keeping all citizens engaged in their cities’ futures, no matter how diverse their demographics.
To find the right solutions to city challenges, you can’t work alone. At Microsoft, we work with our CityNext partners to help cities use technology to deliver citizen-centric services that help them become safer, smarter, healthier, and more sustainable places for their people to live and work — and for others to visit.
Learn how Microsoft CityNext and our partners can help your city achieve more by reading our Sway, visiting our website, and by following us on Twitter.
