Many people walking towards the venue halls of the Smart City Expo 2024 in Barcelona
SmartCity Expo World Congress

ISCN at Smart City Expo in Barcelona 2024 – Impressions

Like a fish in water – that’s how the International Smart Cities Network (ISCN) “swam” through the annual Smart City Expo in Barcelona, perhaps the world’s biggest event on urban digitalization with way over 20,000 attendees and 1000+ exhibitors. The ISCN shared keynotes on comparing German and international smart city projects, organized a little "Meet the German Cities" session, and brought back many impressions and contacts for its network in Germany and the world over.

11/18/2024

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digital infrastructure planning & modelling regional economic structure
Many supercomputing servers in the hall of an older building as part of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre
Martidaniel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ahead of the Smart City Expo, representatives from the ISCN met with the vcity project at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC). After a brief tour around BSC, the two sides discussed some sketches for cases of urban analytics and agreed that it would be wonderful for more cities to join collaborations where they provide their data for urban phenomena to be investigated in a data-driven way and with a focus on the common good. (See here our joint ISCN Global Mixer with indications how to join the vcity project with your own case and no necessity for additional funding.)

An auditorium with a stage where people are listening to a keynote on the Smart City Expo 24 in Barcelona
Smart City Expo World Congress

At the Smart City Expo proper, the ISCN in collaboration with the vibrant booths of the states of Bavaria and Berlin, gave several short keynotes on Smart City in Germany and international counterparts - similarities, differences, trends.

Moreover, on the last day of the expo many German cities came together for a “Meet the German Cities” event, which offered the opportunity for many startups of the expo to “Speed-date” municipal officers from German cities. It was collaboratively organized by the booths of the German states and co-moderated by Enoh Tabak from the ISCN and Damian Wagner-Herold (urbandynamics)

Summarising the Smart City Expo comprehensively is a difficult task, given the sheer size of the event. Nonetheless, the ISCN deems worth the following observations to be highlighted from this year's edition:

  • Citizen-centredness when building and communicating smart city: Citizen-centredness as a principle for smart city development is acknowledged by many actors in the ecosystem. The City Coalition for Digital Rights, for example, fills it with concrete proposals and measures. As a very tangible idea, they discussed how the communication and information on employed smart city technologies in public space could be streamlined and standardized.
  • Digital Twins building up momentum, on their way to full bloom: Next to AI, "Digital Twins" was one of the omnipresent key words on its way to the peak of the hype cycle. At the expo, many first-level approaches or prototypes were presented, both from private- and public-led projects. Often they were crystallizing around use-cases for mobility or crisis response. Yet still many projects would benefit greatly from stronger and more comprehensive data fundaments and catalogues for Digital Twins to be built upon. This would enable more enhanced simulative interaction of data. 
    Notable was how projects differed in the degrees to which they made their Digital Twins accessible to the public, ranging from extended browser-based access with early open testing possibilities for the public, to more internal and closed development and snapshots of the developed solutions. 
  • Smart City is already a lever to better municipal financing: A lot of smart city projects need initial upfront investing. And many common good-oriented projects are not marketable for single private actors, of course, but need funds from the public side to induce new economic potentials, similar to the physical infrastructure of bridges and roads. But smart city projects have shown to be also quite a direct lever to support municipal finances. For one, there is currently thousands of public funding opportunities in the European Union alone. But also, the generation and provision of structured municipal data is increasingly a demand by the private sector, especially large corporations, to back-up their potential investments and reportings. Cities that are able to neatly deliver those, gain a competitive advantage.
  • Deeptech projects calling from the future: Lastly, a big Smart City Expo like the one in Barcelona also offers the intriguing opportunity to glimpse into very futuristic projects, from novel invisible inks, to fluorescent and electricity-producing plants, to special house-coatings that aim at absorbing carbon. 
Many people in groups of 2 or 3 in vivid conversation for the "Meet the German cities" event
Snapshot from the "Meet the German Cities" event Damian Wagner-Herold

Do you have some observations to add? Have you been at the Smart City Expo '24 in Barcelona but you missed the ISCN? Reach out to us via iscn@giz.de, we are always keen on continuing the conversations and bringing together engagement, projects and questions.

Contact

Enoh Tabak

ISCN Netzwerksekretariat
E-mail: iscn@giz.de