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Smart City Expo 2018 sets new frontiers for the urban innovation ecosystem

15/11/2018

The 2018 edition of Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC), the smart cities summit organized by Fira de Barcelona, closes this afternoon after shattering all previous records. During three days the event has brought together over 700 cities from the five continents, 844 exhibitors and over 400 speakers. On its eighth edition, SCEWC has registered over 21,000 attendees, a 17% more than in 2017, from 146 countries, topping the initial estimations. The event has been held together with Iwater, the show on the integrated water cycle, the second Smart Mobility Congress, the Sharing Cities Summit, The C40 talks and the Digital Future Society Forum.

The show gathered some of the leading experts on urban innovation amongst which are Rufus Pollock, economist and founder of Open Knowledge International; Andrew Keen, economist and author of How to fix the Future and Cult of the Amateur; Víctor Pineda, social development scholar and disability rights advocate; and Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker and economist Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner. But SCEWC also brought together top companies within industry like Alstom, Bosch, Cellnex, Cisco, Dassault, Deloitte, FCC, Ferrovial, FiWare, Hexagon, Huawei, Indra, Mastercard, McKinsey, Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom, Engie, Mshereib Properties, Nec, Ntt, SAP, Siemens, Suez and Urbaser.

For the event’s director, Ugo Valenti, 2018 has “set new frontiers for Smart City Expo World Congress and because this year we focused on the transformation of current metropolises into more livable environments, the growth experienced encourages us and the urban innovation community too to persevere in this direction”. “It is clearer than ever that it is our responsibility, both individually and collectively, to capitalize on the tools we’ve seen these days in Barcelona to transform our cities and make them the best possible places for us and the generations to come”, Valenti added.
World Smart City Awards

The city of Singapore was awarded as Smart City of 2018 for its Smart Nation project that aims to transform the Asian city-state into a global benchmark of smart urban solutions through a wide array of solutions from dynamic public bus routing algorithms to real-time parent-teacher portals, or even predictive analytics for water pipe leaks.

The six remaining awards –Innovative Idea, Digital Transformation, Inclusive and Sharing Cities, Governance & Finance, Mobility, and Urban Environment – went to the {delft}LINK initiative to address housing shortage in Cape Town (South Africa); the ICT deployment model by the Government of Gaoqing – Zibo (China); the e-health living lab developed by the city of The Hague (Netherlands); the transformation of Msheireb Downtown Doha (Qatar) into a more welcoming and citizen empowering environment; the multi-modal traffic management system developed in the North Avenue Smart Corridor in Atlanta (USA); and the bold construction of smart buildings in the Jinshan District of Shanghai (China), respectively.

Iwater and the Integrated Water Cycle
The 2018 edition of Iwater focused on the digitalization as a vehicle for improving efficiency and the circular economy as a new means of addressing the scarcity of water resources. The event gathered over 3.000 visitors that were able to discover the latest cutting-edge technologies and solutions showcased by the 100 exhibitors designed to modernize infrastructures and guarantee smart, sustainable water management in cities, industry and agriculture.

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