Europe Must Reward Smarter Behaviour of Cities
Brussels, 13th July 2010
Cities are critical and necessary for achieving EU objectives on a wide range of issues and this must be reflected in EU policy and funding. There is a huge opportunity for the EU, through policies and funding, to help cities to employ intelligent technologies to become smarter and thrive in this new economic paradigm of digital society going forward. This was the message delivered on 12th of June 2010 at the seminar on smarter cities and their role in the future cohesion policy in Brussels in European Parliament. The seminar was hosted jointly by Intergroup Urban in the European Parliament, Union of Towns and Municipalities of the Czech Republic and IBM. Participants were Members of the European Parliament, senior officials from the European Commission, secretaries from permanent representations of Member States, representatives of cities, local and regional associations, business communities, academics and researchers.
In the EU where nearly 80% of EU inhabitants live in cities that generate 70-80% of EU economic activity European debate on sustainable growth can not be thus led without active involvement cities” commented Oldřich Vlasák the main organizer of the seminar Member of the European Parliament and President of the Union of Towns and Municipalities Czech Republic. Participants have agreed that critical for cities‘ growth is how successful they are in addressing the challenges and threats to sustainability they face in governance, transport, public safety, health, education, and utilities such as water and energy in time of grand economic and societal changes. The intelligent technologies can play here a key role to solve old problems in new ways.
Panellists agreed that a new European approach to make our cities attractive, safe and citizen friendly is needed – that is, Europe must enable cities become smarter. Mario Marini, Councillor from Parma, highlighted that “the greatest theme of the local development is the most trivial and expected one but the most difficult one to identify, how to react to changing citizens’ behaviours and preferences.” Director of Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures at the European Commission Mário Campolargo argued that ”Smarter Cities are at the core of the implementation of the European Digital Agenda, because they offer an excellent infrastructure for Internet research and innovation. They offer broadly available broadband, active local research labs, efficient innovation ecosystems and functioning service infrastructures.” However according to Jan Olbrycht. "Smart cities is not just about new technology used by the city authorities to manage the city, it is about making cities user friendly, about making people work together. The change of the paradigm is about how to make the citizens be part of the system." Jan Olbrycht, Member of the European Parliament and president of Intergroup Urban, also called for mirroring criterions that would recognize smarter behaviour of cities in future EU funding policies for urban development.
Oldřich Vlasák summed up what could European Union do to better support smarter urban development: “The European Union should devise a sound and strong instrument for urban development. With regards to European funds, in the next programming period, cities should have control over how funds are allocated and used on particular urban development projects. Smarter life in European cities is not just only about regional policy and structural funds but also greater cooperation across different sectors such as transport, research or social policy.”
Contact: Oldřich Vlasák, +32 (0)2 28 45357 Jan Krelina at +32 (0)493 21 43 46
