As the dialogue of our forum develops, we will update this article with Tweets, video from conference participants, so be sure to check back between Thursday 17 and Saturday 19 September!
Cities are not isolated islands. Global cities are important actors in international politics, a milieu where political influence is gathered and exercised in unexpected ways: cities are entrepreneurs disrupting global governance. Technology is the means for global success.
Over two days, young innovators, city governments, academics, and policy professionals will bring some clarity to the visions, reasons, and methods for creating smart cities. This Wilton Park forum will bring together people who rarely meet to share experiences, expectations and create new collaborations that could improve how we plan smart cities and engage digital citizens.
Sessions will focus on the following topics:
1. National and local smart city strategies - what is a smart city?
2. Fostering international collaborations to co-develop technologies
3. Making smart cities business as usual
4. Securing the digital city and protecting the digital citizen
5. How to build new (sustainable) cities?
6. What kind of digital city do we want to live in?
You can find the full forum programme here.
What is a smart city?
A smart city is an urban development vision to integrate multiple information and communication technology (ICT) solutions in a secure fashion to manage a city's assets – the city’s assets include, but not limited to, local departments information systems, schools, libraries, transportation systems, hospitals, power plants, law enforcement, and other community services - Wikipedia.
By 2025, twenty six global cities are expected to be smart cities and fifty per cent of those will be in Europe and North America.
Various estimates see 58% of the world's population living in cities by 2025 and seventy per cent by 2045.
Of those urban environments more than 280 are likely to be megacities of over 20 million inhabitants.
Meet Visiting Programme Director Oliver Lewis
Wilton Park's team of policy experts and facilitators are the cornerstone of our foreign policy programmes. Whilst we currently have five in-house Programme Directors, we occasionally draw on the niche knowledge of experts outside our organisation.
Oliver Lewis has come to us as Head of Relationships at Improbable, the developers of SpatialOS; a distributed operating system that makes building simulated worlds possible.
"Regardless of their nationality, cities have a lot more in common with other cities. Learning from each other is crucial for survival."
Read Oliver's blog on is experiences of smart cities and his expectation for the event here.
"Whether by accident or design I'm enthused by dialogue around problems and motivating groups of people to solve them. I’m impatient for people to come together and act collectively in the pursuit of some goal."
Science and Technology @WiltonPark
The 21st century had been dubbed by many as the era of technology, with new innovations and fresh uses for existing technologies constantly being developed and utilised. These advances can provide ground-breaking opportunities in various different sectors and industries.
One of these areas is within the urban environment. With various estimates seeing 58% of the world's population living in cities by 2025 and 70% by 2045, cities must use technology to be 'smarter’ in order to avoid the potential insurmountable problems of poverty, inequality, insecurity and design that rapid urbanisation can pose.
This week international experts from all corners of the technology world descend on Wilton Park for an interactive forum on ‘Disrupting cities through technology.’ By bringing together people who rarely meet to share experiences and expectations this interactive forum will add some clarity to the visions, reasons, and methods for creating smart cities. Additionally, the forum will look to forge new collaborations that could improve how we plan smart cities and engage digital citizens.
Another key area in which the development of new technologies is making a considerable difference is within science, particularly genomics. The ability to sequence the genetic code of a large sample of the population is revealing how small variations in our DNA can change our vulnerability to different diseases, and thus how medicine can be personalised for better prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
Wilton Park recently hosted a dialogue, ‘Genomics: using precision medicines to improve global health – how can governments respond?’, seeking to promote international cooperation on this emerging and exciting field, with the aim of supporting the creation of a global network of genomic medicine centres, to ensure that information and expertise can accumulate and be shared.
The convening of experts and stakeholders who rarely interact to discuss the various discoveries made possible by new technologies has been a key strand of discussion in our conference series on ‘The Big Bang and the interfaces of knowledge’ developed in partnership with CERN. These dialogues sought to explore the interfaces between science and religion by broadening the dialogue between scientists, philosophers and theologians, and giving insight into new avenues of joint study and research enabling some of the gaps in our knowledge to be filled.
Science and innovation play a significant part in the foreign policy discussion blend at Wilton Park, and will continue to do so as technology takes up an increasing role in all our lives.
