Smart City Exhibition is the leading event on the theme of “smart cities.” The various ways modern technologies are used locally and globally in daily life, the presence of a common and shared vision to determine a territory’s ability to transform an aggregation of things and people into an ingenious and socially innovative community, where each euro invested in technology can directly impact the quality of life of citizens, will be proposed, analyzed, and discussed there.
For example: Knowing when it’s the right time to dispose of waste, not spending two hours searching for parking with loss of time (and fuel) or reporting an accident you see with your eyes.
The city of the future, organized, efficient, optimized, already exists. It is materialized over three days, between meetings, debates, exhibitions, from Monday 29 to Wednesday 31, in Bologna, it’s the “Smart City Exhibition”: the city of the future is a smart city, simply intelligent.
Different Italian experiences are presented, but above all, it will highlight what is perhaps the best case of application in this field, at least in Europe, Santander.
The Spanish city located on the coast in the north of the peninsula launched, two years ago, the complete computerization of the entire agglomeration: twelve thousand sensors record everything that happens and refer to a single platform.
“A smart city knows how to coordinate all services: the creation of a unique technological structure, a central brain that refers to all peripheral activities,” says Iñigo de la Serna, young mayor of Santander, 41 years old, engineer.
De la Serna launched two smart city projects: “One is called augmented reality. Just point your smartphone at any point in Santander: if it’s a store, for example, you are told its features, hours, nearby bus stops, and schedules of passage, etc.”, explains the mayor.
The other is: “A user sees an incident, explains the mayor, reports it with their smartphone to the municipal services. But also to the local newspaper (El Diario Montañés), which in turn sends information on the traffic problems caused, and so on. Citizenship is therefore closer to politics. And can improve quality of life.”
The “smart city” is also an antidote to the crisis that has hit hard in Spain, seeing the collapse of the construction sector that had driven the Iberian economy for years.
De La Serna also sees an advantage in it: “We have signed four agreements with IT companies that want to come and invest in Santander. Ours is a city of nearly 200,000 inhabitants, not very large, and all projects can be applied on a maximum scale. It is clear that it is tempting for companies.”
And he concludes: “The ‘intelligence’ of a city is measured by the full coordination of the activities of the ‘brain’ that directs them.”
