The Smarty City Expo World Congress in Barcelona (SCEWC) is one of the largest Smart City events in the world. But what is it that makes it also one of the best and most popular ones of its kind?
As the world's leading event for Smart Cities, the SCEWC provides a unique meeting point for the Smart City sector and an innovative platform for urban action worldwide. SCEWC, the event for cities organized by Fira de Barcelona, took place from 13-15 November at the Gran Via venue. In its eighth edition, it gathered representatives of more than 700 cities, featuring major capitals such as Athens, Atlanta, Berlin, Brussels, London, New York, Rome, Stockholm or Yokohama. Over 100 mayors and representatives from five continents were present, analysing how to undertake initiatives that seek to transform cities into places where the lives of their citizens improves.
The SCIS, together with the EIP-SCC, is part of the European Lighthouse Cities community that consists of 12 Smart City projects, covering almost 80 cities across Europe. In Barcelona, the entire community came together at a joint stand with various workshops and three larger Agora sessions to demonstrate how EU funded smart cities are leading the way in driving sustainable and smart innovation. The Smart City projects presented how they are putting smart technologies to the test, and how specific solutions work in practice when it comes to reducing environmental impact and improving citizen’s lives.
As part of the joint European Lighthouse Cities stand, SCIS was represented at the Expo Tuesday through Thursday. The SCIS team used the opportunity to inform, interested stakeholders as well as the broad public about the European Smart City community, about our common approaches, our goals and of course, the SCIS database where you can find lessons learned as well as general information about more than 100 Smart City related projects.
During our SCIS workshop session “Review of legal and regulatory issues in the EU energy markets – Legal Bottlenecks in Electricity Markets”, Katharina Faradsch from SCIS consortium member Prospex invited city or industry representatives, academics, policy makers and any passers-by to join an interactive discussion. SCIS representatives Han Vandevyvere and Stéphanie Kint from VITO and Smart City project members Marko Paakkinen from mySMARTLife and Angelo Giordano, involved in various projects (R2CITIES, Remourban, Stardust,…) were actively taking part in the discussion.
Gabi Kaiser, leader of the Dissemination & Communication work package at SCIS, chaired the workshop “Communicating the Smart City” where she invited various Smart City communication representatives, both from Lighthouse- and Follower Cities but also projects in general, to talk about their best practices but also things that did not go as expected.
Moreover, the SCIS consortium took part in the SCC1 internal task force meetings to encourage and promote the cooperation between the initiative and its related projects.
The 12 Smart City projects as well as SCIS and EIP-SCC have all received funding under the EU’s Horizon 2020 work programme as part of the EU’s long-term ambition to create a low-carbon economy and ensure continued competitiveness in the global market: mySMARTLife, Smarter Together, Replicate, Remourban, SmartEnCity, Sharing Cities, Triangulum, Ruggedised, GrowSmarter, Stardust, IRIS, MatchUp, EIP-SCC and SCIS.
While in Barcelona, we have been actively tweeting from our SCIS Twitter Account - #SCEWC18 #CitiesToLiveIn #SmartCityExpo