26/10/2022

Smart City Expo gathers over 700 cities and regions and strengthens its role as the key urban summit

Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC), the event on cities and urban innovation organized by Fira de Barcelona, will bring together in its eleventh edition representatives of more than 700 cities from the five continents, consolidating itself as one of the main platforms for urban innovation. The Congress, which will be held from 15th to 17th November at the Gran Via venue, will be attended by high-level representatives from major cities such as Amsterdam, Atlanta, Barcelona, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Doha, Frankfurt, Kiev, New York, Paris, Quito, Reykjavik, Rio de Janeiro, Roma, Seoul, Stockholm, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Vienna.

Mayors taking part in the event feature those from Accra (Ghana), Amman (Jordan), Ashdod (Israel), Barcelona and Bilbao (Spain), Doha (Qatar), Dún Laoghaire and Limerick (Ireland), Dubrovnik and Split (Croatia), Incheon (South Korea), Nagoya and Yokohama (Japan), New Orleans (United States), Podgorica (Montenegro), San Juan (Puerto Rico), Reykjavik (Iceland), Vilnius (Lithuania) and Yangon (Myanmar).

A high-level delegation from Kiev will take part in SCEWC. Several representatives from the city will participate in the conferences and the situation of the Ukrainian capital after months of war will also be shown through VR devices at the European Commission booth. The representation of urban governments also includes delegates from Baghdad, Brasilia, Bucharest, Dortmund, Dublin, Dubrovnik, Eindhoven, Florence, Freetown, Incheon, Jakarta, Lisbon, Marrakech, Munich, New Orleans, Porto, Quito, Rosario, Santiago de Chile, Sao Paolo, Torino, Ulaanbaatar, Vilnius, Yokohama and Zurich.

Additionally, the exhibition space of SCEWC will host pavilions from countries such as Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United States, and also stands of the European Commission, UN Habitat and the World Economic Forum.

The director of SCEWC, Ugo Valenti, stated that “becoming once again the capital of smart cities is a huge honour for Smart City Expo World Congress. Welcoming representatives from over 700 cities, as well as a significant number of mayors and ministers from different parts strengthens our role as key element in the global urban innovation agenda. Barcelona and the event are more than the place where the leading organizations in the industry meet with clients, they have become a driver of innovation and change in the urban landscape. And being able to help transforming the world into a better place for its inhabitants to achieve a more sustainable and liveable planet has been our goal since day one.”

It is particularly noteworthy that half of the top 50 metropolises featuring in A.T. Kearney’s Global Cities Index 2021 will be taking part in SCEWC. New York, London, Paris and Tokyo continue to lead the list while other such as Doha figure among the most improved in the last year. Business activity, resilience, the attraction of talent or cultural life are some of the parameters used to elaborate this classification.

Infrastructure, Mobility and New Materials
SCEWC will be held together with to other events focussing on mobility and new materials: Tomorrow.Mobility and PUZZLE X. The first of the two is co-organized by EIT Urban Mobility, an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, a body of the European Union, and will hold its second edition in November. It will tackle urging challenges such as putting Public Transportation as a global priority in a context of rising energy prices, using low-emission-zones, electrification and micromobility to achieve carbon neutrality as soon as possible, and safely developing Urban Air Mobility.

In addition, SCEWC will also host for a second time PUZZLE X. The event aims to grasp the potential of Frontier Materials to solve some of the challenges that society is facing. Among the key technologies featured are quantum materials, low dimensional materials, 2D materials like graphene.

Barcelona, October 26th 2022