Lighthouses at Barcelona – Remourban and fellow Lighthouse projects attend Smart City Expo World Congress
The World Congress is going from strength to strength with ever more attendees (18,000+), speakers (420) and exhibitors (675), and representing over 700 cities. As such, it has become a must for all the 12 Lighthouse projects including Remourban, which was represented in Barcelona by coordinator Miguel García (CARTIF), Jeronimo Hinojosa from Valladolid Municipality, Pablo Rivas from GMV, and Raffaella Moreschi from youris.com. At the session on Smart City Strategies and Governance, Miguel shared the stage with team members from MySmartLife, REPLICATE, GrowSmarter, TRIANGULUM and SmartEnCity, to highlight the need to empower cities with the right tools for urban renewal. These include support for setting out strategies and mechanisms for creating appropriate ecosystems to implement such strategies – the key point here is to ensure these tools go beyond the politics of the day to become mainstream and long term. According to Miguel, “this long-term approach is currently one of the main barriers encountered by towns and cities struggling to define and implement their strategies.” He went on to focus on the experiences of Smart City VyP (Valladolid and Palencia in Spain) which generates pioneering projects in urban and intercity scenarios between the two cities, while involving and ecosystem of wide-ranging stakeholders (municipalities, SMEs, industries, research centres, etc.). At an earlier speaking session, Jeronimo (Valladolid Municipality) delivered his insights on data management and urban sharing platforms which are facilitating urban policy-making and helping provide all-important feedback to technology developers and the research community. Pablo (GMV) used the three-day event to delve into measuring performance of smart cities. Following all the various sessions closely and manning at the Lighthouse projects’ stand, Raffaella (youris.com) shared her impressions of this 2017 edition of the World Congress: “It has been a very stimulating experience to see REMOURBAN in a competitive context where solution providers, research and the cities operate in the same arena to showcase their solutions and approach to making our cities smarter. Moreover, the Remourban team can be proud to see that how the solutions we provide in REMOURBAN are indeed state of the art”. Teaming up with fellow Lighthouse projects at such a flagship event helps makes REMOURBAN stronger and gives us critical mass for boosting visibility and impact. Like last year, the Lighthouse projects shared a stand where various thematic speaking sessions were held including district heating, smart waste management and urban mobility solutions. Many of those whom we met at the stand were impressed by the scale of the operations undertaken by the Lighthouse project and by their real impact on the lives of city residents.
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Spain