Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: barcelona

  • Barcelona fears becoming Venice

    Barcelona fears becoming Venice

    “We don’t want to become like Venice,” is the cry from Barcelona’s new government.

    Comparing Venice to Barcelona is problematic given the Spanish city has a population of 1.6 million compared to the Italian tourist centre’s 60,000. The tourist industry has long overwhelmed Venice.

    A more relevant discussion is how does a city like Barcelona avoid a decline like Venice, in my interview with the deputy mayor Antoni Vives in 2013 he described his aim to see the city develop new industries and build on its existing strengths.

    The new mayor’s concerns about soaring property costs displacing residents are valid –and shared with every major city in the world.

    For Barcelona though the real challenge is to stay relevant in a changing global economy. For the moment the Spanish city has a long way to go, and five hundred years, before its leaders can worry about becoming the new Venice.

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  • Building inclusive cities

    Building inclusive cities

    Yesterday Barcelona won the 2014 Bloomberg Mayors’ Challenge — a ideas competition for European cities.

    Barcelona’s winning idea was collaborative care networks for older citizens. In Barcelona’s case one in five residents is over 65 and by 2o40 seniors will make up a quarter of the city’s population.

    The approach Barcelona’s council has proposed is a combination of high tech and the community working together.

    Barcelona will use digital and low-tech strategies to create a network of family members, friends, neighbors, social workers, and volunteers who together make up a “trust network” for each at-risk elderly resident.

    Last year I had the opportunity to interview the Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, Antoni Vives, on how the city was using the internet of things to improve citizens’ lives.

    In that interview Vives spoke on how important was that these technologies improved the lives of all citizens, not just the young and the rich. Today’s prize illustrates how the city is applying that philosophy.

    For technologists, one of the tasks ahead is to show how today’s inventions are more than the toys of rich men, but are things that genuinely improve society’s well being.

     

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  • Touring the Barcelona smart city project

    Touring the Barcelona smart city project

    Last year I posted the Geek’s Tour of Barcelona, looking at the town’s smartcity initiatives after visiting the city for Cisco’s Internet of Things World Forum.

    At the Australian Internet of Things Forum in Newcastle last month I cobbled together a quick presentation around the topic to illustrate what smartcities can deliver.

    This was particularly topical for Newcastle as the New Lunaticks and the local business community are supporting the Kaooma project run by Vimoc Technologies in one of the city’s entertainment districts.

    Kaooma – which is an entrant in Cisco’s IoT Innovation Grand Challenge – is particularly interesting because it’s a wholly private project with little, if any, formal government support as opposed to London’s Regent Street Internet of Things initiative that’s part of a billion pound regeneration of the precinct.

    Australia’s Newcastle, the world’s largest coal port, has a number of challenges itself as the country’s once in a century mining boom unwinds and city deals with a neglected downtown in the face of a rapidly changing economy.

    While the Barcelona project is in early days, the presentation shows how cities are using the Internet of Things today and gives us some hints on how those uses will evolve over time.

    Paul travelled to Barcelona as a guest of Cisco Systems

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  • Cities of Industry

    Cities of Industry

    The latest Decoding The New Economy interview feature Laurel Barsotti, Director of Business Development at the City of San Francisco discussing how the city refound it’s entrepreneurial mojo.

    A notable point about Laurel’s interview is how she has similar views to Barcelona’s Deputy Mayor Antoni Vives about the importance of industry to San Francisco.

    For some time it was an article of faith in the Anglo-Saxon world that the west had become post-industrial economy where manufacturing was something dispatched to the third world and rich white folk could live well selling each other real estate and managing their neighbours’ investment funds.

    “Opening doors for each other” was how a US diplomat described this 1980s vision according to former BBC political correspondent John Cole.

    It’s clear now that vision was flawed and now leaders are having to think about where manufacturing, and other industries, sit in their economic plans.

    Barcelona’s and San Francisco’s governments have understood this, but others are struggling to realise this is even a problem as they hang on to dreams of running their economies on tourism, finance and flogging their decidedly ordinary college courses to foreign students.

    For some political and business leaders this is a challenge to their fundamental economic beliefs. It’s going to be interesting to see how they fare in the next twenty years.

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  • Building smart cities

    Building smart cities

    What will the connected cities of the 21st Century look like and how will they provide service for even their most disadvantaged residents?

    The latest Decoding the New Economy Video features an interview with Antoni Vives, Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, about his community’s journey to become a smart city.

    What’s striking about talking with Antoni is how passionate he is about Barcelona’s future and the importance of the city building new industries around the digital economy.

    Particularly notable is the administration’s vision for the city which combines Barcelona’s traditional industries, such as the port, with future technologies.

    “Barcelona has to become a city of culture, creativity, knowledge but mainly fairness and well being,” says Antoni when asked on where he sees his city as being in ten years time. “I would love to see my city as a place where people live near where they work, I would love to see the city self sufficient in energy and it should be zero emission city.”

    “Rather than having a pattern of PITO –  ‘Product In, Trash Out’ we should move to what we call the DIDO model – ‘Data In Data Out’.”

    It’s a broad view for the future which many other city and state governments will be watching closely.

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