A city where cars fly between skyscrapers and robots coexist with people. The city of the future is often imagined this way: as an almost science-fiction scenario, dominated by technologies capable of transforming the daily lives of citizens. But Smart City Expo World Congress proposes looking at this city of the future from another perspective. Rather than imagining futuristic scenarios or presenting technologies that seem impossible, the congress aims to show how to respond to problems that cities already face today: how we move, how we consume energy, how we manage resources, or how we ensure that everyone can access housing.
In fact, it's not just about talking about the future, but about the present: the pavilions showcase projects, tools, and solutions that are being developed in different parts of the world and can serve as examples for other territories. With this underlying objective, the exhibition transforms, until this Thursday, Fira de Barcelona's Gran Via venue into a kind of miniature city that shows how cities could be transformed.
The visitors to the exhibition are the inhabitants of this ephemeral city and cause constant movement. As in any city, there are journeys, meeting points, and spaces for conversation and exchanging ideas. Attendees move from an exhibitor to a presentation, stop to discover projects, and look for proposals that can inspire better management of their cities. In this coming and going, languages and accents from all over the world are also heard. Conversations mix languages from representatives of Japan, China, Romania, Slovakia, Argentina, and many other countries, who have traveled to Smart City Expo World Congress to showcase the solutions already being applied in their municipalities.
With this mix as an essential characteristic of the congress, the Fira pavilions thus become a kind of city of cities: a concentration of attendees from all over the world who share urban problems, but who arrive with different experiences and ways of trying to solve them. In total, the exhibition expects to gather more than 27,000 attendees and representatives from a thousand cities until this Thursday.
And, as happens in other major technological congresses, such as the Mobile World Congress or ISE, the innovative technology presented there captures a large part of the attention of attendees. Thus, among the more than 1,100 exhibitors, major technology companies such as Dell, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA stand out. But, as the tour of the exhibition progresses, it becomes clear that the issue is not just to show how far technology can go, but to explain what it is for and how it can contribute to solving the problems of cities.
“Technology is not an end in itself,” defended Raquel Gil, fifth deputy mayor for Social Rights, Economic Promotion and Employment, Feminisms and Democratic Memory of the Barcelona City Council, during the inaugural session of Smart City Expo. Innovation, she stressed, consists of “converting knowledge, technology, and creativity into concrete solutions for shared challenges.” Because cities do not advance into the future only when they incorporate more technologies, but when these new tools help solve specific daily challenges: improving mobility, saving energy, making services more accessible, or preparing for the effects of climate change.
Ultimately, this is the idea that runs through much of the congress. A smart city — an smart city — is not necessarily one that accumulates more technology, but one where life is better. Ugo Valenti, director of Smart City Expo World Congress, expressed it this way in an interview with The New Barcelona Post: “The best indicator of a smart city is that you don’t want to leave it.” A way to remember that, above screens, data, and devices, the value of a city is measured by the quality of life of its citizens.
Robots, data, and solutions for today's cities
This perspective can be found in many of the technologies presented in the pavilions. Thus, one can see smart traffic lights and bus stops, but also digital twin systems: virtual reproductions of a city, like Barcelona, that allow observing how the urban environment works and testing it before making decisions. For example, one can simulate what would happen if the direction of a street were changed, the lighting modified, or traffic reorganized, and analyze the effects without having to make these changes on the ground first.
Robotics is one of the demonstrations that most easily manages to stop visitors. Among the stands appear humanoid robots and others with animal shapes, but also machines designed to perform specific tasks. AiMOGA Robotics, a company linked to the Chery Auto group —Ebro's strategic partner—, presents a robot that has already served as a traffic controller in Chinese cities like Wuhu. A technology that could also have applications in other spaces, such as libraries, where it could help users locate books on shelves. The same company also shows Mobo, a smaller humanoid robot, designed for assistance, interaction, and companionship at home. And a few stands away, a robotic arm surprises attendees by autonomously preparing french fries.
Drones are another common presence at the fair, with examples like those used by the National Police. And, a little further on, one can also test autonomous electric aircraft that are being considered as possible air taxis. The image is closer to that futuristic city that has been imagined for years, but the data presented by EHang, the company exhibiting one of these aircraft, indicates that it is not just an idea on paper: it claims to have already carried out more than 90,000 flights in about twenty countries.
Not all proposals, however, need robots or grand demonstrations to attract attention. Some invite us to stop and look at urban challenges from another perspective. This is the case of Terra50, an immersive space under a dome that presents fifty climate solutions applied in 32 countries. The experience allows us to learn about initiatives such as the submarine desalination capsules from the Norwegian company Flocean, or the recycling model of the Japanese city of Kamikatsu. These are projects that may not have the visual impact of a robot or an aircraft, but that address essential issues for the future of cities: water, waste, energy, and the capacity to adapt to climate change. Here too, innovation is measured less by spectacle than by utility.
A smart city also needs housing
This year, in addition, the congress premieres HOWS Barcelona, a summit that brings together more than a hundred experts to debate urban planning, regulation, social housing, new construction systems, and rehabilitation. This new summit within the congress responds to a reality that can hardly be left out of any debate on the urban future: access to housing. Because, however advanced mobility or energy management systems may be, a city cannot be considered smart if a part of its inhabitants cannot live there because they cannot find affordable housing. “Talking about better cities means, first and foremost, that people can live in them,” emphasized Constantí Serrallonga, CEO of Fira Barcelona, during the inauguration of HOWS Barcelona.
For this reason, the congress has decided to incorporate a specific space this year to address the housing crisis and explore how to expand the supply, renovate existing buildings, and find new forms of collaboration between the public and private sectors. And, in this sense, technology alone cannot solve this crisis, but it can help make visible some of the problems that often remain off the map. UN-Habitat, for example, uses artificial intelligence and satellite images to identify and map informal settlements in Central America and Africa. A job that previously could take months has been completed in just 72 hours.
Global solutions, local challenges
And in this miniature city of the future that Smart City Expo World Congress represents, Barcelona is not only the setting for the meeting: it also participates with its own initiatives that it wants to share with other cities. At the Barcelona City Council stand, under the slogan Barcelona, where innovation flourishes, various municipal services and projects that already have a real application in the Catalan capital are presented. From efficient homes, developed by Amura, to fire detection and alarm systems manufactured by the Catalan company Detnov.
And even this Barcelona innovation is manifested in concrete projects, such as the DFactory, the complex promoted by the Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona to concentrate companies and initiatives linked to Industry 4.0. And the Consorci has taken advantage of the congress, in fact, to explain how this area of the city is being transformed: the space, which currently occupies about 17,000 square meters, is expected to grow to nearly 60,000 with the ongoing expansion. One of the central pieces will be the Cube, a glass building designed to host events, which will be ready this November.
But the Consorci's idea is to go even further: once these 60,000 meters are finished, as detailed by Pere Navarro, special delegate of the State to the Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona (CZFB), the space will face a third phase of works to add another 40,000 square meters, with new spaces for companies and even an auditorium.
The expansion of the DFactory is an example of how some of the ideas presented at the congress these days are also translated into concrete transformations of cities. Because, beyond the great technological demonstrations and projects that are still looking for application, Smart City Expo wants to become the showcase for these solutions that are already transforming various cities so that their inhabitants can live better.