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Smart City World Expo Congress 2022: The urban world and the technological innovation meet in Barcelona

22 Nov 2022 — From November 15 to November 17th POCITYF participated to Smart City Expo World Congress to exchange ideas about the future of Smart Cities.

Inspiration provokes change, therefore to inspire is the goal of the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) which took place in Barcelona from November 15 to November 17th. With more than 40,000 attendees in-person and online, this 11th edition focused on creating new mobility options and developing safe, collective and human-centric cities.

Main topics were:

  • Enabling technologies;
  • Energy and environment;
  • Mobility;
  • Governance;
  • Living and inclusion;
  • Economy;
  • Infrastructure and buildings;
  • Safety and security.

Throughout POCITYF project, we are involving cities in the renewable energy transition respecting their cultural heritage sites. New promising models within the energy sector (i.e., Positive Energy Districts and E-mobility integration) as well as social innovations mechanisms are being developed.

Many of our partners (EDPL, GA, NEC, CME, DECSIS, UW, DIPGRA, ITeC) were present at the SCEWC. It was the perfect chance to discuss some inspiring results in order to share practices and open up opportunities of collaboration for a better future urban world.

In particular, we took part to the following activities:

  1. On November 15th Susanne Nieuwenhuijs from Alkmaar joined a discussion “What’s in it for the cities?” with other SCC projects (ATELIER, SPARCS, Making-City, CityxChange, RESPONSE).
  2. On November 16th Tommaso Giomi, Jose Lucas and Kathleen Blanco from ITeC held a talk about “High-Information Sustainable Digital Models for Cities”. The talk focused on how digital models should be created in order to achieve sustainability.
  3. On the same day Julia Pereira from EDPL together with other representative of SCC projects (ATELIER, RESPONSE, Making-City) took part to the discussion “Positive Energy District: Still so much to find out!”. Open questions such as ‘how can cultural heritage cities keep the pace of the EU cities in becoming net zero?’ and ‘Can cultural heritage cities make the transition without the EU funding?’ were posed to the audience.
  4. How do we reach climate neutrality in cities by 2030? What are the cities’ needs and how can they be accomplished and implemented? On November 17th Joao Bravo Dias from EDPL tackled these questions with other SCC projects (AI4Cities, ATELIER, NetZeroCities, RESPONSE, SPARCS, CrAFt, CityxChange) and together with the EC directorate DG ENER and SC Marketplace.

Do you want to be inspired? Read more about the Smart City Expo World Congress here.