Smart Cities: It's Not About Technology, It's About People

Before I talk about the expo itself, in the three conference days I understood that ultimately, everything is about people, and I had the opportunity to reconnect with several people who have become part of my personal and professional world, and to meet interesting new people working on making the world better. My conviction deepened: connections between people create the greatest value. And this is directly relevant to smart cities. The realization from the expo After walking the pavilions from around the world for three days and attending several interesting talks, one significant insight emerged. Almost the entire exhibition focuses on technologies of one kind or another. Every pavilion presents a technological application under the smart city umbrella, with the main structure organized by countries or large cities, and companies and projects grouped under them. The technologies on display revolve around sensors, cameras, data collection, communication networks, smart urban transport, and citizen-facing apps. But honestly, I didn't see any new technology that truly amazed me. The panels that actually mattered One panel on equality said something that stayed with me: technology is important, but worthless without citizens. Participants included:

• Rinat Gaay from Tel Aviv Municipality speaking about involving city employees and citizens in processes and initiatives
• Liverpool Mayor Joan Anderson on co-designing the city together with residents, Co-Design was one of the best concepts from the panel
• Nick Palmarini from UK's National Innovation Center for Aging on the critical importance of connecting with citizens Another panel, PuzzleX, asked: what will 2040 look like? The most important question raised: how do we change human behavior to consume less? How do we re-educate what the new "enough" is for humanity? Nobody had a definitive answer, and that's precisely the point. The conclusion So I didn't write about technologies here, because there are no truly smart cities. There are smart people who know how to take and extract insights from the data collected in a city. The technology is the infrastructure. The people, residents, officials, designers, innovators, are what transform that infrastructure into genuine value.