Call for awards: Smart City Expo

The Smart City Global Award has been established in order to identify the best cities, projects and innovative initiatives in line with the Smart City concept.

The aim of the award is to nurture the development of future cities thus enhancing quality of life, sustainability, innovation, creativity, competitiveness, and efficient management and administration.

All projects and solutions that contribute to any of the areas covered in the Smart City Expo World Congress can be submitted for consideration.

As a reminder, please find below a brief description of the Smart City Expo World Congress themes:

Cities are a major contributor to CO2 emissions in Europe and America. Forthcoming challenges include improving efficiencies in energy consumption and transport, increasing production from renewable sources, developing the energy grid, balancing the energy mix towards the renewable, boosting energy production on an urban scale, reducing environmental impacts, building zero carbon housing or developing the electric infrastructure necessary to make the use of the electric vehicle more widespread.

The world is facing major environmental challenges, and cities are major consumers of energy and natural resources. New decentralised infrastructures for energy production are at the centre of the debate. At the same time, waste and water management has to evolve from today’s recycling model to a new model that includes the product lifecycle, inverse logistics procedures and waste/water consumption reduction. Other topics in this area are those centred on reducing CO2 emissions – the urgent objective to which, for instance, the electric vehicle has to contribute.

Thanks to modern technology, cities can now be converted into sensory beings that communicate their needs and their responses to certain scenarios in real-time. To efficiently respond to challenges in areas such as mobility, energy and environmental protection, tomorrow’s cities must establish systems capable of handling the massive amount of data generated by their residents and infrastructure.

At the same time, technology is not enough and other innovation is required. For example, we need to improve the urban services management model. Technology also provides ways to boost citizen participation and to develop open government

Cities are primarily about people and their living conditions. ICTs are setting a new landscape for analyzing society, to make it interact and collaborate, to empower citizens to develop their initiatives, to foster creativity and to learn new ways to innovate. Furthermore, the same applies when ICTs are not broadly available, as key policies still deal with collaboration, creativity, right decisions and better place

Urban planning deals with the space where we live and work: how it is produced and managed, how it is imagined and how it becomes feasible. Urban design deals afterwards with its physical form. After half a century of car-centred planning, both disciplines are now refocusing on the human scale. Cities must foster creativity, innovation and economic development. Urban planning must be an inclusive project for all citizens. Cities must be reinvented and transformed: they must care and protect the environment, and integrate different kinds of green spaces, urban agriculture, urban services and urban utilities into a new urban model.

For the last 20 years, cities have been challenging the mobility paradigm generated around cars as the principal mode of transport. Today, the vehicle paradigm itself is also being challenged by climate change and current natural resources deployment. There is a widespread use of new ICTs for all means of transport, which allow for real-time information or variable signalling according to traffic conditions. There is a change of focus from policies to develop infrastructures to those concerned with the improvement, and integration of the management of mobility services.

City governments need to play a major role in the implementation of reform agendas.

In modern society, the city governments are facing higher demands from their citizens with regard to services offered and to the capacity to influence or to have a voice in the city government. This happens in an environment of decreasing economic resources and within a conflictive share of responsibilities among city, regional, national and supra-national government bodies. Partnerships with private companies are crucial to developing new projects. In addition, government openness to the public and to the fostering of creativity and entrepreneurship are among the main policies that have to be developed: open government, transparency and open data.