Smart City Miami® Magazine - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

FALL/WINTER 2023 CHEONGNA STUDIO CITY VISIONING © THE DIGIT GROUP

SMART CITY MIAMI MAGAZINE

SPECIAL EDITION

BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES INNOVATION & CHANGE

SUSTAINABLE GROWTH

RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE

CLIMATE ACTION Smart City Miami | 1

Smart CITIES Americas

BUILDING THE SMART CITY ECOSYSTEM IN SOUTH FLORIDA

We work with local, national and international actors offering a wide scope of news, research and events production to ensure sustainable solutions to the complex urban environmental issues that major cities are facing worldwide.

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LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

Welcome, I am thrilled to present to you this special edition of Smart City Miami Magazine, produced and published

by Smart Cities Americas LLC. “BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES” was the theme of Smart City Expo Miami 2023, held September 18-20, 2023, in Downtown Miami.

The relevance of the subjects presented motivated us to launch this special edition. The event, in its fourth annual edition, reached a global audience.

The participation of professionals from different countries, cultures, and languages resulted in a roster of award-winning and globally recognized speakers— the best thinkers in urbanism and technology—to raise awareness of the importance of Urban Planning, Climate Action, and Green Economy. The result was the creation, assembly, and presentation of the leading

event on sustainable cities in the United States.

In essence, the immersive experience and impactful talks and connections empowered participants, catapulting the movement with practical, optimistic approaches to fostering climate action.

Among the participants, we had representatives from cities; countries; local, national, and international technical bodies; nongovernmental organizations; corporations; startups; and entrepreneurs. We have to thank the speakers, participants, and organizations that supported us.

It is also necessary to acknowledge the professionalism and dedication of the Smart Cities Americas team, which contributed greatly to the success of the event and to the publication of this magazine.

Bernardo Scheinkman

Architect & Urban Planner Founder & CEO, Smart Cities Americas LLC Founder, CEO & Curator, Smart City Expo Miami

Bernardo Scheinkman Founder & CEO, Smart Cities Americas Miami, Florida Architect and urbanist Bernardo Scheinkman is building South Florida’s smart city ecosystem and leading it through Smart Cities Americas, the platform for smart cities intelligence, trade shows, and conferences. He interacts with local, national, and international stakeholders to offer a wide range of news, research, and events through his organization that promote sustainable solutions for complex urban environments.

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SMART CITY MIAMI MAGAZINE

Bernardo Scheinkman Publisher & Founder & CEO, Smart Cities Americas Sherri Balefsky Hanson Editor & Creative Director Riley Kaminer Writer Tere Garcia Photographer Editorial Advisory Board Jonathan Reichental Founder & CEO, Human Future Paul Doherty CEO, The Digit Group Bas Boorsma Partner, Venturerock Urban (Global) Leticia Latino CEO, Neptuno USA Raimundo Rodulfo CIO, City of Coral Gables Smart City Miami Magazine - Special Edition is a special edition published by Smart Cities Americas LLC with content from the Smart City Expo Miami 2023 - Building Sustainable Communities held September 18-20, 2023, in Miami, Florida, USA. SmartCityMiami.com

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Smart City Expo Miami Advisory Board: Jonathan Reichental, David Graham, Sandra Baer, Bernardo Scheinkman, Leticia Latino, Raimundo Rodulfo, Paul Doherty, and Bas Boorsma

SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI ADVISORY BOARD

The Smart City Expo Miami Advisory Board held its annual in-person meeting during the fourth edition of the event, September 18-20, 2023, in Downtown Miami. The Advisory Board supports the Executive Committee.

The meeting highlighted the importance of curating themes for the expo, which provide attendees with a learning experience (this year’s theme was Building Sustainable Communities). It also noted the importance of holding the world’s first AI Summit for Mayors, which raised awareness among policymakers and key decision-makers about what artificial intelligence can do in the smart city space.

The committee also selected six leading innovators who have made significant contributions to advancing sustainability at the community level for the expo’s “Who’s Who In Sustainability” awards. They also discussed the strategy for putting together the upcoming fifth edition, including its theme, speaker selection, marketing work, and venue.

SMART CITY ADVISORY BOARD Bernardo Scheinkman Board Chair, Founder & CEO, Smart Cities Americas; Founder, CEO & Curator, Smart City Expo Miami Jonathan Reichental CEO, Human Future Paul Doherty CEO, The Digit Group Bas Boorsma Partner, Venturerock Urban (Global) Raimundo Rodulfo CIO, City of Coral Gables Leticia Latino CEO, Neptuno USA Sandra Baer CEO, Personal Cities

The Advisory Board and speakers in lively conversation during the lunch break

David Graham CIO, City of Carlsbad

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SECTION NAME

SMART CITIES AMERICAS BUILDING SOUTH FLORIDA’S SMART CITY ECOSYSTEM

Smart Cities Americas is attracting leading smart cities companies to Miami that will generate $40 billion revenue for South Florida businesses, while creating more than 20,000 new jobs in our region.

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mart Cities Americas is building South Florida’s smart city ecosystem.

Led by architect and urbanist Bernardo Scheinkman, it is the leading platform for smart cities intelligence, trade shows, and conferences. The organization interacts with local, national, and international stakeholders to offer a wide range of news, research, and events that promote sustainable solutions for complex urban environments.

According to Scheinkman, “A city is smart if its citizens are smart.” Technology might immediately come to mind when people think of smart cities. However, technology is just a tool that enables modern urban areas.

Smart Cities Americas believes in focusing on what citizens want and need from their government, and using new technologies to make the government work for them.

It is clear that businesses stand to gain from the smart city revolution. Global market research consulting firm Frost & Sullivan expects the market value of smart city opportunities to surpass $2.4 trillion

6 | Smart City Miami

by 2025. Technology spending comprises approximately 15% ($327 billion) of this overall valuation. The remaining 85% is distributed across activities, including education, smart infrastructure, smart health care, smart energy, smart transportation, and smart building.

Smart Cities Americas is fostering a community around urban innovation. The organization unites smart cities stakeholders under one roof, from architects and urban planners to business leaders and cuttingedge technologists.

Miami continues to be validated as a top destination for developing new ideas and catalyzing innovation. Leading startups and venture capital firms are increasingly growing roots in the Magic City. Miami is home to innovative, environmentally conscious companies working in sectors as diverse as mobility, marine tech, and built infrastructure.

Equally, local government officials are tackling climate change head on. The City of Miami has committed to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, having set out

an action plan for building a green economy.

Miami-Dade County even has the world’s first Chief Heat Officer. And with its ongoing Sea Level Rise Strategy, Miami-Dade County is identifying and developing financially feasible mitigation and adaptation strategies to prepare for sea level rise and coastal storms.

Smart Cities Americas’ flagship event is Smart City Expo Miami, which brings together some of the world’s leading urban innovators under one roof. The 2022 brought award-winning and globally recognized experts to raise awareness on the importance of urban planning, climate action, and green economy.

Simultaneously, Smart Cities Americas is developing Miami’s smart cities ecosystem through a handful of other initiatives. Its forthcoming news channel, SmartCityMiami.com, will highlight trends related to urban innovation and citizens’ engagement in the process of building sustainable and resilient urban environments.

Its streaming hub, CitiesHub.tv, will provide video content about the Smart City Expo

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The Leading Platform for Smart Cities Intelligence, Trade Shows & Conferences SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI International Conference & Expo

Miami and related media.

Its Hack-a-Town program and CIURBE-Urban Innovation Lab will enable civic-minded technologists to maximize their impact.

With these and more initiatives already underway, Smart Cities Americas is attracting leading smart cities companies to Miami that will generate $40 billion revenue for South Florida businesses while creating more than 20,000 new jobs in our region. And the best is yet to come.

Discover more about Smart Cities Americas’ quest to put Miami on the map for smart city innovation by visiting SmartCitiesAmericas.com.

“A CITY IS SMART IF ITS CITIZENS ARE SMART.” — BERNARDO SCHEINKMAN, FOUNDER & CEO, SMART CITIES AMERICAS

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The Streaming Portal

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The Innovation Lab

C-MOVEMENT

Engage and Empower Citizens, Communities & Cities Smart City Miami | 7

SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES September 18-20, 2023

Innovators, visionaries, and leaders converged at Smart City Expo Miami to shape the future of sustainable living.

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mart City Expo Miami – Building Sustainable Communities, held September 18-20, 2023, brought together participants to discuss how to create better cities for communities, citizens, and cities and stimulate the public and private partnerships necessary to make this vision come to life. The city experiences presented by our speakers can be found in articles published in this edition of Smart City Miami Magazine.

Over the last four years, Smart City Expo Miami has successfully brought together the best minds in urbanism and technology with decision-makers—all in a single room and through a single platform.

“THE IDEA BEHIND THESE TALKS IS THAT WE WANT OUR EXPO TO BE MORE THAN A MEET-ANDGREET BETWEEN COMPANIES, EXPERTS, AND PUBLIC SERVANTS IN THE SMART CITY SECTOR. WE WANT OUR AUDIENCE TO BE INSPIRED AND LEAVE WITH ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS.” — BERNARDO SCHEINKMAN, FOUNDER & CEO, SMART CITIES AMERICAS 8 | Smart City Miami

With global reach, the expo serves as a platform for entrepreneurs and government representatives to share their ideas, understand each other’s pain points, and inevitably create smart and sustainable cities.

AI Summit for Mayors By creating more awareness about the latest advancements in AI and its capabilities and connecting industry experts with these decision-makers, we can expect more collaborations between enterprises and the public sector and bring in artificial intelligence for public benefit. That’s precisely what Smart City Expo Miami accomplished with the first-ever Artificial Intelligence Summit for Mayors, which discussed

the role of generative AI in architecture, construction, urban planning, and more and its associated risks.

Who’s Who In Sustainability Our “Who’s Who In Sustainability” awards highlighted the leading innovators who have made significant contributions to advancing sustainability at the community level. These innovators are dedicated to sustainability and environmental consciousness, and their work doesn’t go unnoticed. They aim to offer innovative solutions and awareness-building initiatives with groundbreaking technologies.

Smart City Expo Miami was thrilled to acknowledge them all for their contributions to a greener, more sustainable future.

THE POWER OF SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI Award-winning and globally recognized experts.

Stimulate public and private partnerships in infrastructure.

Promote educational activities.

The place to connect the whole smart city ecosystem.

The best thinkers in urbanism and technology.

Encourage the use of circular economy.

Engage with local communities in powerful ways.

Position Miami as a launchpad for innovation.

Raise awareness on the importance of urban planning, climate action, and green economy.

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Neom, Saudi Arabia Read more on page 32.

© NEOM

INNOVATION & CHANGE 14 Innovation Through Education Dr. Beatriz Gonzalez, President, Miami-Dade College Wolfson Campus

16 Data Is the Secret Ingredient for Smart City Success Dr. Jonathan Reichental, CEO, Human Future

18 Human and Social Capital in Smart Cities Paul Doherty, CEO, The Digit Group

20 Designing Exploratory Urban Environmental Media: From Awareness to Action Biayna Bogosian, Architect & Professor of Architectural Technology, FIU

22 Wave Power as a Renewable Energy Source Inna Braverman, Founder & CEO, Eco Wave Power © ECO WAVE POWER

24 Reclaiming “City” in the “Smart City”: How India Is Redesigning the Approach to Smart Urban Development

‘Hyper-Abundant City’ at Apgujeong Waterfront Read more on page 26.

Naman Sharma, Bloomberg Harvard Summer Fellow

SUSTAINABLE GROWTH 26 Transforming Urban Living: Frogeex’s Blueprint for Resilient, Livable, and Smart Cities Jana Skokan, Co-Founder & Director, Frogeex

28 Smart Regenerative Cities for a Low-Carbon Future Carl Welty, Architect, Carl Welty Architects

30 A Future Vision of Miami Committed to Natural Infrastructure Aaron DeMayo, Founder, Future Vision Studios

32 From Smart City to Cognitive City Uri Ben-Ari, CEO, UBA Ventures 10 | Smart City Miami

© AESTHETICA STUDIO

Eco Wave Power Read more on page 22.

Starlet Coral Pavilion Read more on page 38.

© FIU

RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE

Heat Island Reduction Read more on page 40.

34 A Data-Driven Hybrid Shoreline Infrastructure to Enhance Coastal Resilience Sara Pezeshk, Post-Doctoral Fellow, FIU School of Architecture

36 Toward Net-Zero Impact: Designing for Urban Resilience Biayna Bogosian, Assistant Professor, FIU School of Architecture Sara Pezeshk, Post-Doctoral Fellow, FIU School of Architecture Thomas Spiegelhalter, Professor, FIU School of Architecture Marilys Nepomechie, Distinguished University Professor, FIU School of Architecture

40 Resilient Urban Environments: A Disaster Is a Hazard You Didn’t Prepare For Alan Scott, Director of Sustainability, Intertek

42 Renewable Integration, Grid Stability, and Utility Viability Pamela Hamblin, Business Development Manager, Select Power Systems

44 Stormwater: From Global Contamination Source to Resource Using “At Source” Treatment Craig Ari Rothleitner, Founder & Director, ARI Water Solutions

46 Digital Umbrella for the City: Kyiv.Digital Anatolii Vovniuk, Deputy CIO, City of Kiev

CLIMATE ACTION 48 Climate, Health & Circuitry: The Triad of Urban Resilience Bonnie Schneider, Founder, Weather and Wellness

50 Embracing Your Role in Building a Climate-Ready Future Caroline Lewis, Founder & Senior Advisor, The CLEO Institute

52 Fireside Chat: Climate Tech Matt Haggman, Vice President Opportunity Miami, The Beacon Council Laura Gaviria Halaby, CSO, Faktory AI Smart City Miami | 11

TABLE OF CONTENTS

QUALITY OF LIFE 54 Applying Science, Collaboration, and Experimentation to Improve Quality of Life Raimundo Rodulfo, CIO, City of Coral Gables

56 Nurturing Nature Explorers: Embracing Nature in Playground Design Ebru Ozer, Principal, LandscapeDE & Professor, FIU

58 Where Do You See the Beauty?

Martina Frattura, Head, The Beauty Movement

60 The Underline

Ekin Smart City Pole Read more on page 54.

Jake Moskowitz, CIO, Friends of the Underline

INCLUSIVE & SHARING

62 A House for Everyone: Architect as Facilitator

76 Trust and Cities

Elisa Silva, Director, Enlace Foundation

Sandra Baer, CEO, Personal Cities

64 Bike to School & Pop-Up Bike Lanes: Better Cities & Less Traffic, Starting with Kids First

78 The Alchemy of Tradition and Innovation: Creating People-Centric Connected Communities

Kurt Kaminer, Social Media Manager, BikeSafe UHealth Hank Resnik, President, Bike Coconut Grove

66 Building a More Resilient and Sustainable City Beautiful

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David Graham, CIO, City of Carlsbad

80 The EcoSteam Project: Empowering Students for a Sustainable Future Dr. Edna Pasher, CEO, Israel Smart Cities Institute

Matthew Anderson, Assistant Director Mobility and Sustainability, City of Coral Gables

82 Promoting Sustainability and Resilience Through Transformative Education

DATA & TECHNOLOGY

Sarbeswar Praharaj, Assistant Professor, University of Miami

68 Turning Industrial Digital Twins into Urban Social Metacities/Citiverses Dr. José A. Ondiviela, Industry Advisor Smart Cities, Microsoft Western Europe

70 Reshaping Urban Horizons: The Trifecta of Digital Twins, Edge AI, and Web3 in Smart Cities Deployments Dr. Ingrid Vasiliu-Feltes, Founder & CEO, Institute for Science, Entrepreneurship and Investments

72 Enhancing Smart Cities with User-Friendly AI Sara Rushinek, Professor of Business Technology, University of Miami Avi Rushinek, Professor, University of Miami Denise Mendez, Engineer, Microsoft Mixed Reality

74 Smart Taipei: Government as a Platform; City as a Living Lab Dr. Chen-Yu Lee, Director, Smart Taipei 12 | Smart City Miami

84 Smart City Summit & Expo Taipei Philip Wang, Senior Global Advisor, Taipei Computer Association

86 AI Summit for Mayors A Generative AI Primer for Mayors Dr. Jonathan Reichental, CEO, Human Future AI’s Potential in the Government Context David Graham, CIO, City of Carlsbad How Can AI Be Used to Enhance Disaster Response and Management in Cities?

Raimundo Rodulfo, CIO, City of Coral Gables

90 Who’s Who in Sustainability 92 Launchpad Infrastructure Is Crumbling Our Minds and Bodies Andy Boenau, Storyteller, Urbanism Speakeasy

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Hello, I am pleased to welcome you to the third-annual edition of Smart City Miami Magazine, which features articles from the dozens of speakers who presented at Smart City Expo Miami - Building Sustainable Communities from September 18-20, 2023. These speakers joined the conference both virtually and in person to share their expertise in subjects related to smart cities, climate action, sustainable growth, resilient infrastructure, data and technology, quality of life, inclusive and sharing practices, and bringing communities together at the city level. Although the presenters came from all parts of the world and different industry sectors, they were united under one theme: Building Sustainable Communities.

Putting together this magazine for the third year has

made me increasingly aware that what makes a city sustainable cannot just be achieved through the latest and greatest technology (which is, by the way, already within arm’s reach); the challenge lies in how we apply this technology at both micro and macro levels to making communities more sustainable. I was also reminded that, with the effects of climate change becoming more of a reality, we cannot wait for government to act. We all need to be active participants in our cities if we want them to survive and thrive. This means getting involved with nonprofit organizations, voting in local elections, and advocating for equality at all costs. I hope this magazine lets you see cities around the world through a new lens and inspires you to take action to ensure that our communities are habitable for generations to come!

Sherri Balefsky Hanson Editor & Creative Director Smart City Miami Magazine

Visit SmartCityMiami.com for the latest updates, news, trends, and more regarding urban innovation and community engagement in building sustainable, resilient cities around the world.

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INNOVATION & CHANGE

INNOVATION THROUGH EDUCATION KEYNOTE BY DR. BEATRIZ GONZALEZ AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Smart cities don’t happen by accident. How can cities build toward a more sustainable and resilient future? The key component is collaboration between city governments, local businesses, and citizens.

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s president of the Miami-Dade College Wolfson Campus, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to Downtown Miami. I think it’s great you’re having this event here because you experience that cacophony of sights, sounds, and smells, and that kind of mash-up is really good for coming up with new ideas.

I think the other reason it’s great to have this expo in Downtown Miami is because of what’s right in your face: the density of people everywhere. You can also step out on any terrace and smell the ocean and the bay. Hopefully, those reminders of people and place are exactly what those thinking about smart cities need.

I’m going to say what I think is an obvious truth: Smart cities require smart people.

Smart cities don’t happen by accident. We have to learn things. We have to be open to doing things differently. We have to be willing to let some paradigms shift for ourselves.

Hopefully, people are willing to learn so that we can advance our cities and communities. An organization that marries educators with business people

is an excellent way to do it. The people in business are already seeing the issues, are already witnessing the problems and trying to find solutions. But they are also seeing the gaps, so communicating with education and working together is how we’re going to advance our cities. It’s how we’re going to surmount these wicked problems that we face in Miami and globally.

I have been an educator for many years. I am also a licensed mental health counselor.

And in order to be both of those things, there are two things that I fundamentally believe: The first is that everyone can learn from everyone. Everyone can go from here to there. And the second thing is that everyone can change. Our city can change how it does things. What’s necessary to learn and change? Well, you have to want to. Like they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. So what I wish for everyone is that your desire to make change will stimulate others and transfer to our students, our policymakers, and all the great thinkers that we have in the city. I hope you’re able to infuse your optimism and your knowledge across our community.

“SMART CITIES DON’T HAPPEN BY ACCIDENT. WE HAVE TO LEARN THINGS. WE HAVE TO BE OPEN TO DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY. WE HAVE TO BE WILLING TO LET SOME PARADIGMS SHIFT FOR OURSELVES.” 14 | Smart City Miami

Beatriz Gonzalez President, Miami-Dade College Wolfson Campus Miami, Florida Dr. Beatriz Gonzalez is President of Miami-Dade College’s Wolfson Campus. Prior to her work at MDC, she served as Chief Diversity Officer, Vice Provost, and Professor of Counseling at the University of La Verne in California. As Vice Provost, she supported teaching and learning with responsibility for sponsored research, community-engaged learning, faculty development, student affairs, library and learning resources, career services, tutoring services, and advisement and registration. Gonzalez is an American Council on Education Fellow, an E. Kika De La Garza Fellow, and was the recipient of the 2017 Woman of Distinction Award for California’s 41st Assembly District for her efforts in promoting educational access and quality.

Dr. Beatriz Gonzalez at Smart City Expo Miami

Miami-Dade College Wolfson Campus

Dr. Beatriz Gonzalez at Smart City Expo Miami

Antonio Delgado Fornaguera, Vice President of Innovation and Technology Partnerships at Miami-Dade College

Michael Mannino, Director, Artificial Intelligence Center of Miami-Dade College

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INNOVATION & CHANGE

DATA IS THE SECRET INGREDIENT FOR SMART CITY SUCCESS KEYNOTE BY DR. JONATHAN REICHENTAL AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Data is the most important asset in most organizations. Governments have an abundance of data, too, but are often not maximizing its potential. This article discusses the role of data in building smarter and more sustainable cities, providing guidance that includes building a data culture and governing and managing data.

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hen I was asked to write a book about data two years ago, I was told that data is the most important asset in every organization, that data is the new oil.

So, I spent about a year researching it, and I came to the same conclusion. It doesn’t matter if you run a city, a university, or a research lab: Data is the most important asset in your organization.

For example, cities have to evaluate the quality of all roads and decide which roads to repair first. My team was tasked with finding a better way to do this. So, in the spirit of Silicon Valley, I got a napkin and drew what I thought was the solution.

And whenever someone saw it, they’d say, “This is going to be expensive to build, and it’s going to take a long time.” Those are the two things you hear whenever you have a new idea in a city. Well, I was hired to help my team think differently. I went to Stanford University with my colleagues and the mayor and said, if we give you the data, can you build this? We gave them the data, they made the interface, and in 48 hours, they produced a fully functioning solution for us. There are different ways to do things. If somebody says we can’t, the answer for me is, “Why not?”

But the real takeaway is that the data was fundamental to this solution. The interface is easy. What’s hard is having good-quality data. Once you have the data, you can build a solution on top of it.

Data provides a solution to a lot of issues.

If we are going to solve big problems, if we are going to think differently, we have

16 | Smart City Miami

to use data. We made the data open by default. The real way to solve or add to our solution is to co-create with our community.

Now, this is not unusual. Many cities make their data open. That means that data collected becomes available to anyone who wants it.

We’re collecting an enormous amount of data. What can we do with this data? How can we look at the city differently? Every time somebody reports an issue, we learn something. Many cities deploy an app here, but they don’t do anything with the data after the initial use. But we took the data and mapped it in near real time against a map of the city so that people could see what was happening in real time.

If a lot of issues are reported in a particular area, maybe something’s happening there that, if we get to the bottom of it, we can stop it from happening.

That’s how you make policy. That’s how you make good decisions in government— not based on anecdotes or gut feelings, but on evidence-based data.

That’s how we will change our communities and build smarter communities when people have the insight to make the right choices, whether about

mental health or the climate.

Data is the most important asset in your organization. During the 20th century, what drove productivity? What drove the global economic model? It was oil. And to some degree, that continues to happen.

But we’re moving past that in the 21st century. Data is replacing oil as the driver of economic progress.

It can seem like in 2023, this is such an old idea, but the reality is we’re not there yet. Even the private sector struggles with this. We’ve entered what we call the Zettabyte Era. From the start of civilization to today, we’ve created about 120 zettabytes of data. We think we’ll double that in the next three years. Why? Because everything generates data.

How do we know whether we’re a datadriven organization? Well, 83% of CEOs want a data-driven organization, but only 32% are achieving that goal. There’s a major gap between what we desire and achieve. If data is the most important asset in your organization, and yet only one-third of organizations are achieving it, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

What’s sobering is that over 48% of employees indicate they tend to follow

“IF DATA IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ASSET IN YOUR ORGANIZATION, AND YET ONLY ONETHIRD OF ORGANIZATIONS ARE ACHIEVING IT, WE ’VE GOT A LOT OF WORK TO DO.”

Jonathan Reichental at Smart City Expo Miami

Jonathan Reichental CEO, Human Future San Francisco, California

their gut instincts rather than relying on data-driven insights. That’s not good. Data culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Every organization is undergoing a digital transformation, but many are not succeeding. Only about 20% to 30% of projects ever succeed anyway. However, digital transformation projects fail more often. Why? It’s the absence of a data culture.

What I mean is how an organization behaves. You have to build these things.

And one of the ways we build it is through Data Governance, managing the value and risks of organizational data. Data governance is the most important topic to focus on.

How does an organization know what data it has, where it is, and how it’s being used? Can you find the data you need to run your business? If you can’t find the data, you’re at a disadvantage. Part of data governance is being able to find the data, have access to it when you find it, and be able to use it.

In Palo Alto, we are engaging the community by making data available. They

can build solutions and not wait for the government. And that’s what this company did when they observed this problem. They built a solution called Civic Insight based on our permitting data. We didn’t spend a penny. It didn’t take us any time. And the community got a solution.

How do you manage your data in a quality way? What are your priorities? How do you know you are getting results? You have to measure all the time. What gets measured gets managed.

You have to make these sets of data a priority. You have to see how many errors are in the data. And you have to track that over a period of time. When you do, you’ll have the results—and, hopefully, they are good results. Because if you don’t, everybody’s wasting their time. You have to tackle the right problems. I want you to prioritize data because if you start working on this journey to make your organization a more data-driven culture, you will get results. It helps your organization.

And, if you’re running a city, it helps the community. Because that’s fundamentally what it’s all about.

Dr. Jonathan Reichental is a multiple award-winning technology and business leader whose career has spanned both the private and public sectors. He’s been a Senior Software Engineering Manager, a Director of Technology Innovation, and served as Chief Information Officer for O’Reilly Media and the City of Palo Alto.

Reichental is currently the founder of advisory, investment, and education firm Human Future and also creates online education for LinkedIn Learning. He has written five books on the future of cities: Smart Cities for Dummies, Data Governance for Dummies, Exploring Smart Cities Activity Book for Kids, Exploring Cities Bedtime Rhymes, and Cryptocurrency QuickStart Guide.

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INNOVATION & CHANGE

HUMAN AND SOCIAL CAPITAL IN SMART CITIES KEYNOTE BY PAUL DOHERTY AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

I have learned that Utopia does not exist in the Digital Age, but we can try to build upon human wants, needs, and desires to do our best to achieve healthy, livable, and sustainable futures.

I

n my experience, master planning for the Digital Age has been a continuous balancing exercise in analyzing past, present, and future information while managing expectations of a broad swath of people, while always asking who is paying for all of this. I have deep respect for elected officials, appointed officials, and staffers in city administrations around the world that have to manage and administer urban environments. It is, at times, a thankless job and, other times, an amazing job, a job that our world needs: amazing people to lead by example. The master plan of any city is a moving target that is constantly being challenged by events that, in some cases, were unforeseen. The COVID-19 pandemic is an example. The adaptability and adoptability of a master plan is one of the great challenges to our city’s leaders.

With this in mind and with the experience of working closely with government leaders and officials over the years, our company takes our master planning very seriously and builds flexibility into every solution. Our process includes taking that city’s smart cities priorities (we call a stack) and ensuring that innovation projects are slotted in a timeline that is sensitive to budget pressures and scheduling while always having consistent storytelling and communication of the bigger picture with internal administration and the general public. This approach is not perfect, but over time, the rhythm of what, why, where, and how innovative projects are implemented and measured will become trusted, providing permission for the next stack of priorities to begin their process. It works like a large organism with external elements pushing into the plan while internal elements are grabbing for attention.

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Someone once mentioned that our master planning process is like making sausages: not pretty during the process, but delicious and good-looking at the end of the process.

A best practice we have found to be useful is to celebrate success, no matter how small. As the pieces of the plan fall into place, there have been a lot of resources and energy used by numerous people in order to get that piece of the puzzle accomplished.

Celebrate this. Awards, a call out, or a pat on the back can go a long way to keep people’s enthusiasm and discipline going during the never-ending journey of an urban master plan. Using the main outcomes of the master plan as a touchstone for storytelling is another best practice we are seeing being used. The reference to the United Arab Emirates’ Happiness Index is a good example of this. Utilizing many small projects as measures of an overall happiness index shows people that even one person can have an effect on the community.

Identifying, accessing, and using authenticated urban data is a big challenge in a smart cities master planning process.

Although there is usually plenty of data to use, the quality levels of this urban data can be variable at best and unusable at least. In some cases, we have resorted to putting a line in the sand and beginning a new data collection process with data quality standards moving forward into the future. This provides a clean slate to have our smart cities programs, systems, and solutions at efficient levels of operations. This strategy also brings the opportunity to focus on cleaning only the past data necessary to integrate into our clean data pool, not spending an inordinate amount of time and money cleaning large swaths of data without a focused need. Once there is trust in

the basic urban data as our foundation, we can then begin a formal process of discovery in our master planning process.

In the case of both new smart cities and existing city planning, our company begins its master planning and metrics with the discovery of the cultural anthropology of the people that either will reside or are residing in that urban environment. Our work with Dr. Karen Stephenson and her identifying, analyzing, and providing insight into people in a specific location has proved to be our secret sauce in designing and developing urban environments that delight. In Dr. Stephenson’s network science process, the cultural aspects of studying human behavior also take into consideration elements like climate, geography, history, cuisine, celebrations, traditions, mythologies, placemaking destinations, and values that are unique to that specific location on Earth.

Mixing these elements into a matrix and heterarchy provides us with a road map of what is important to the community in an accelerated method, providing conversations much earlier in the master planning process than traditional methods.

Some background on Dr. Stephenson’s approach: Network science is an interdisciplinary field that studies complex networks in biological, physical, and social phenomena. Research in human dynamics emerged in the mid-20th century utilizing graph theory to mechanistically model computer networks onto more ephemeral small-group dynamics. Twenty-first-century research witnessed a fusing of virtual and physical worlds and how data from those worlds is captured and calibrated in humanecological-financial systems.

Establishing protocols for human and

Paul Doherty CEO, The Digit Group Paul Doherty at Smart City Expo Miami

social capital is to recognize the relevance and importance of human digital data in this field of inquiry. Currently, IHEs (Institutes of Higher Education) struggle to keep up, but governments and private corporations have moved forward, making entrepreneurial inroads, only stopping short of establishing protocols and policies.

Having these frameworks become meaningful to an individual and being able to put solutions in place in a smart cities master plan that are valued means having permission to use people’s personal information. To be clear, our smart cities master plans have never and will never be used to capture personal identifiable information (PII) and reuse it without their knowledge. This Web 2.0 strategy that has created powerful companies like Google, Facebook, and others does not work in a smart cities environment. Rather, a Web 3.0 strategy of permissions, rewards, and transparency is a more natural fit for implementing personal information into a high-performing urban environment.

PII is any data that could potentially identify a specific individual. Any information that can be used to distinguish one person from another and can be used for de-anonymizing anonymous data can be considered PII. PII can be sensitive or non-sensitive. Non-sensitive PII is information that can be transmitted in an unencrypted form without resulting in harm to the individual. Non-sensitive PII can be easily gathered from public records, phone books, corporate directories, and websites. Sensitive PII is information that, when disclosed, could result in harm to the individual whose privacy has been breached. Sensitive PII should, therefore, be encrypted in transit and when data is at rest. Such information includes biometric information, medical information,

personally identifiable financial information (PIFI), and unique identifiers such as passport or Social Security numbers. This is how we respect, manage, and utilize personal information in a Web 3.0 context for our smart cities master plans.

We use this human-centric approach as our constant reference as we move further into our development of a smart cities master planning process. When we are planning a greenfield urban environment, we have to take into consideration that we are fast-tracking a traditional urban growth process at a quantum scale. Usually, cities grow over long periods of time. Most cities start out as trading posts, gathering people together who learn over time how to live, work, play, and learn. In the case of most greenfield smart cities, there are little to no local resources to draw from, and there needs to be the seeds of inhabitants to begin the process.

Over the past centuries, humankind has evolved. So have the ways in which humankind lives, loves, plays, and works.

The steam engine introduced trains, which changed where cities are built. The internal combustion engine changed the manner in which people move from point A to B. The elevator completely changed the way in which cities are designed and built. It is time to move forward into the next millennium, to utilize the knowledge, AI technology, and experience gained over the past 300 years to not only assist the next coming paradigm shift in humanity but concurrently create a more efficient, effective, and conscious manner in which humanity exists.

To better understand the true complexities of smart cities, one must break down the existing beliefs we currently operate within.

One needs to open the door to a new future

Memphis, Tennessee Paul Doherty is Chairman and CEO of TDG (The Digit Group), a globally renowned and award-winning architect, and one of the world’s most soughtafter thought leaders, strategists, and integrators of process, technology, and business. As seen in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg TV, acknowledged by CNBC as one of America’s Business Titans, and reported by Forbes as “Changing the World,” Doherty is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council and a Fellow of the International Facility Management Association (IFMA). TDG is a smart city real estate development company that provides financing, design-build, and innovative technology solutions worldwide.

and foster a new acceptance of the virtual world, which will change the manner in which we approach design, construction, energy, transit, housing, safety, and education. Yes, this is a very large topic of discussion, but I hope to shine a light on new solutions that, when implemented together, could very well promote an environmentally cleaner, more energy-efficient, and ergonomically friendlier life experience for humanity in the future.

I have learned that Utopia does not exist in the Digital Age, but we can try to build upon human wants, needs, and desires to do our best to achieve healthy, livable, and sustainable futures.

Smart City Miami | 19

INNOVATION & CHANGE

DESIGNING EXPLORATORY URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL MEDIA: FROM AWARENESS TO ACTION PRESENTATION BY BIAYNA BOGOSIAN AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Miami faces imminent threats from rising seas, flooding, and extreme weather. The climate phenomenon dubbed “global boiling” in July 2023 served as an alarming wake-up call worldwide.

Temperatures soared to unprecedented levels, underscoring the urgent need for action. In Miami, the challenges are magnified due to geographical vulnerability. My work as an interdisciplinary researcher at Florida International University leverages technology, especially immersive media, to engage citizens in combating this existential threat. Visualizing environmental data through innovative platforms fosters education and empowerment. This article chronicles my efforts in harnessing immersive and interactive experiences to spur collaborative community action.

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iami’s precarious position necessitates creative solutions.

The era of global boiling has brought the city’s environmental perils into sharp focus. Persistently high temperatures, inundation from rising seas, and intensifying storms pose grave risks to human health, infrastructure, and socioeconomic stability. Amid these daunting realities, my research aims to provide hope by revealing pathways to a sustainable future.

Central to this vision is fully utilizing environmental data. Initiatives like the Keeling Curve demonstrate the linkage between scientific insights and policy outcomes. Since 1958, continual measurement of atmospheric CO2 from Hawaii has exposed the stark trend of rising levels. This meticulous, longterm data collection has proven pivotal to monitoring climate change. Likewise, leveraging information to address Miami’s complex environmental threats will be critical.

The Keeling Curve stands as an aspirational model of the illuminating power of reliable, consistent data. Harnessing this potential can empower our city to navigate interconnected ecological challenges.

My approach connects local initiatives to global frameworks like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which

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are comprehensive strategies encompassing 17 interconnected objectives related to social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability. The SDGs provide a shared blueprint for cities worldwide to align efforts at the local level with an overarching vision. The strategic use of data visualization makes these ambitious global targets resonate with diverse audiences. Embracing SDGs gives Miami‘s actions increased focus and heightened impact.

However, realizing the full potential of environmental data requires filling prominent gaps. Currently, only 40% of the indicators

needed to monitor SDGs are accessible.

The remaining 60% include deficiencies in coverage, timeliness, and stakeholder participation. Overcoming these barriers demands cooperation across government, academia, and industry to ensure the collection and availability of necessary data. These gaps will only constrain Miami’s sustainability initiatives if they are remedied.

Bridging the void between awareness and impact depends on education. Literacy regarding environmental matters acts as an essential conduit for converting interest into Save Biscayne Bay Event, Summer 2022

© CREST URBAN SUPPLEMENT

Biayna Bogosian at Smart City Expo Miami

“BRIDGING THE VOID BETWEEN AWARENESS AND IMPACT DEPENDS ON EDUCATION. LITERACY REGARDING ENVIRONMENTAL MATTERS ACTS AS AN ESSENTIAL CONDUIT FOR CONVERTING INTEREST INTO ACTION. ” action. My research introduces immersive media as a portal for delivering data to the public in compelling new formats. Virtual and augmented reality platforms are especially well-suited for experiential learning beyond traditional settings. They promote lively exchange and hands-on involvement with local ecology.

In addition to education, incentivizing participation is vital for generating quality data. Insights from game theory provide guidance for optimizing engagement.

Offering rewards, recognizing activism, incorporating entertainment, and enabling research contributions can each help mobilize citizens. Applying these incentives sparks intrinsic motivation to participate.

My initiatives also seek to transform how urban environmental data is collected.

While static sensors provide high spatial resolution, deploying mobile sensors across smart infrastructure and transportation networks holds transformative potential. The proliferation of low-cost, internet-connected sensors opens real-time data gathering across entire cities. Strategically implemented, distributed mobile sensing could revolutionize Miami’s environmental monitoring capabilities.

Let me highlight some concrete ways my research group employs immersive

media to promote ecological awareness and action. In Shanghai, we collaborated on wearable sensors for air quality data. In Los Angeles, an interactive biking recording overlaid pollution information. Augmented reality apps turned collecting sensors across campus into an educational game.

Ongoing work includes the “Deep Water” project, which utilizes a HoloLens augmented reality headset to vividly showcase South Florida’s sea-level rise exposures. Combining real-time and archival water quality data from governmental agencies, institutions, and citizen science efforts facilitated by my research group, this experience highlights the importance of open-access spatio-temporal data for informing public literacy and policy.

My initiatives echo similar global efforts that fuse technology, design, and science to engage communities. Structured dialogues, experiential learning, and co-creation are powerful tools for collectively tackling daunting environmental challenges. Miami can become a model of resilience and sustainability through coordinated local action supported by data.

Despite the gravity of accelerating climate change, hope remains that citizens and institutions can alter our trajectory through dedication and innovation. My work aims to play a constructive role in this transformation.

Biayna Bogosian Architect & Professor of Architectural Technology, FIU Miami, Florida Biayna Bogosian’s academic and professional background extends to architecture, urban design, environmental design, computational design, data science, spatial computing, physical computing, and immersive media design. Her interdisciplinary research has allowed her to understand innovation in design and technology within a broader environmental context and explore data-driven, participatory, and citizen-centric approaches to improve the built environment.

Smart City Miami | 21

INNOVATION & CHANGE

WAVE POWER AS A RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCE PRESENTATION BY INNA BRAVERMAN AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Opportunities, challenges, and insights into the impact of Eco Wave Power, recognized as a pioneering technology by the Israeli Ministry of Energy.

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am the founder and CEO of Eco Wave Power, a company that developed a unique, innovative technology to generate clean electricity from ocean and sea waves.

I was born in Ukraine in 1986; two weeks after I was born was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

My mother approached my crib and saw I was not breathing. She gave me mouth-to-mouth until the ambulance came and saved my life.

I grew up feeling like I was special and could actually do something good for the world.

After college, I discovered the world of renewable energy. And whereas solar and wind were packed with competitors, there was nothing to innovate in terms of the technology.

Wave energy was something that everybody was super passionate about. All the scientists and engineers said wave energy could produce twice the amount of electricity the world produces now, yet nobody was able to make it commercial. It was too expensive.

Wave Energy Why is wave energy so great? First, in suitable locations, wave energy can produce 24/7, as opposed to solar energy, which is only available during the day. Wind energy is an amazing source but usually is dominant early in the morning or at night when the population usage is at the lowest. In addition, the density of water is 832 times greater than air, meaning we can produce much larger electricity amounts with much smaller (thus cheaper) devices. And according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, wave energy alone can produce 66% of all the energy the U.S. needs for comparison.

Commercialization Collectively, the U.S. is producing only 18% of renewable energy. Still, 82% is from polluting

22 | Smart City Miami

sources. In addition, two-thirds of the world population currently lives on the coastline.

With that population distribution, the need for wave energy is undeniable because we can save a lot of money on the transmission costs.

Usually at this point, the question asked is: If wave energy is that great, why wasn’t it being commercialized? A lot of funds were invested into it. A lot of big-shot companies went into that field. Why weren’t they successful?

A company called Pelamis tried. They basically took a big red snake and installed it in the middle of the ocean. Inside this snake was all the expensive equipment—the hydraulic conversion and the generators.

It was too expensive. The construction cost about $150 million for a power station that could supply only 100 households. Still, investors decided to invest in it because they thought it would start out expensive but the price would go down. But Pelamis broke down after three days of operation. The reason was because offshore, you have waves of 20 meters and higher. And, unfortunately, no man-made stationary equipment can survive the load of a 20-meter wave. Insurance companies saw that it was expensive and breaking down constantly and were reluctant to insure it. Offshore wave energy and environmentalists, which were supposed to be the greatest proponents of wave energy, were objecting to wave energy because you had to connect it to the ocean floor, which would disturb the marine environment.

Another problem was that these companies got so preoccupied with lowering their cost and surviving that most of them never connected to the electrical grid. So, there became a big question whether wave energy could safely connect to a national electrical grid.

Our Solution Eco Wave Power is a completely different technology and concept. We do not go offshore. We only connect to existing manmade structures such as piers, breakwaters, and Ries. The only things in the water are the floaters, which belong in the water. All the expensive machinery is on land inside a shipping container just like a regular power station. So simple but smart.

How It Works How does our technology work? Our floaters are connected to existing structures such as piers, breakwaters, and jetties. The floaters go up and down with the movement of the waves. They’re pushing the hydraulic cylinder, which transmits biodegradable fluid into landlocated accumulators. A pressure is built: the higher the wave, the higher the pressure, which turns the hydromotor, the generator, and sends clean electricity into the grid.

Competitive Advantages One of the advantages of the technology is that it’s cost-efficient. Our first gridconnected installation was in Gibraltar in 2016. This 100-kilowatt capacity cost us only $450,000 (in comparison to $150 million).

That’s a big breakthrough. We’re also 100% environmentally friendly because we do not connect to the ocean floor; we only connect to existing structures, which already disturbed the environment. We’re taking something that is not prime real estate and turning it into a source of clean electricity.

The technology is also reliable. When the waves are too high for the system to handle, the floaters automatically lift above the water level and stay locked until the storm passes. Then, they go back into the water and

Eco Wave Power’s Wave Energy Technology, Gibraltar

© ECO WAVE POWER

commence operation. And because we’re reliable and cost-efficient, we’re fully insurable and have been grid-connected for six years.

Eco Wave Power Development Pathway We started testing in the Hydro Mechanical Institute in Kyiv in 2011. We tested different floater shapes to see how they influenced energy generation. Then, we deployed an off-grid, small-scale 10-kilowatt power station in the Port of Jaffa. From 2016 to 2022, we deployed a grid-connected power station in Gibraltar. Now, we’re deploying our second grid-connected power station in Israel, which is the first time in history that wave energy is connected to the national electrical grid.

Project Execution The Israel project is in collaboration with the Israeli Energy Ministry, which funded 50% of the installation. The other 50% was funded

by EDF Renewables, a subsidiary of the French National Electrical Company. Our next installation is in the Port of Los Angeles.

It’ll be the first onshore or near-shore wave energy installation in the U.S. Projects Pipeline Our first commercial-scale installation is planned in Porto, Portugal. We entered our first commercial agreement for 20 megawatts, which is about 20,000 households. That’s already a big installation for the wave energy field. And we’re starting with 1 megawatt, which is 1,000 households. We plan to start construction in early 2024, which will take 18 to 24 months. Then, we can show that wave energy is not only cost-efficient, reliable, and easily connected to the grid but that wave energy can become profitable and produce significant energy. The company currently

Inna Braverman at Smart City Expo Miami

also holds a pipeline of 404.7 megawatts in different locations around the world. Recently, we became publicly traded on NASDAQ. I always say that passion is the greatest renewable energy source, even stronger than the power of the waves. When I was 24, I wasn’t taken seriously. I heard a lot of no, and still, I didn’t give up. I want to inspire others to pursue their dreams. Even if something seems impossible, even if you feel like you can’t achieve it, you don’t have the money or the contacts, it’s possible.

I believe the solution for all the world’s problems is combining renewable energy sources. Because each source is available during different times of the day and different seasons. So, if we really want to flip the ratio, we need to install and implement more renewable energy sources.

Inna Braverman Founder & CEO, Eco Wave Power Tel Aviv, Israel Inna Braverman founded Eco Wave Power at age 24. Under her leadership, the company installed its first grid-connected wave energy array and secured a significant project pipeline of 404.7MW. She was recognized by Wired as one of the “Females Changing the World,” by Fast Company as one of the world’s “Most Creative People in Business for 2020,” and is the winner of the United Nations “Global Climate Action Award.” For Braverman, clean electricity is a personal journey, as she was born two weeks before the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster and suffered respiratory arrest due to the pollution. She got a second chance in life and decided to devote it to developing clean and safe electricity production.

Smart City Miami | 23

INNOVATION & CHANGE

RECLAIMING ‘CITY’ IN THE ‘SMART CITY’

HOW INDIA IS REDESIGNING THE APPROACH TO SMART URBAN DEVELOPMENT PRESENTATION BY NAMAN SHARMA AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

While Indian smart cities have deployed technological infrastructure for data-driven governance and evidence-based planning, their policies, plans, institutional structures, and public service delivery methods distinguished them from the typical smart city image.

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lobally, the idea of a smart city has turned out to be a misnomer. At its birth, this latest model of urban utopia assured the highest quality of life by empowering the urban populace to maximize their creative potential and guaranteed ingenious solutions to “wicked” urban problems. The central idea of the smart city was to deploy emerging technologies like AI and IoT to lay a “phygital” network for a continuous flow of data that would inform the decisionmaking of city administrators, planners, and everyone else involved in the business of cities to achieve better outcomes.

At the peak of the movement, the smart city proponents promised to “make cities safer, healthier, and more efficient” while ushering in a paradigm shift in how they were to be run by leveraging technology.

Solutions like smart streetlights, surveillance cameras, air quality sensors, and dashboards quickly became its poster child.

Technology giants like IBM, Cisco, and Alphabet stimulated the proliferation of the idea and its innumerable benefits, pushing vast amounts of public and private capital investment in technology infrastructure.

But just after a decade of demonstrating proof of concepts, the capability of smart city technologies to solve critical urban challenges is being questioned. The pandemic revealed the detrimental impacts of diverting public funds from core urban infrastructure to build ubiquitous cloud

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infrastructure. It forced cities to relook at their investment priorities and sparked a debate about the opportunity costs of these technological solutions. A testament to this misadventure came out at the end of 2020 when Cisco decided to shut down Cisco Kinetic for Cities, its flagship smart city service.

Although cities started their journeys of becoming smart with good intentions of fostering creativity, opportunity, and prosperity, the smart city’s aggressive technology-led nature has ended up merely being a technology mobilization mission.

Its detachment from the realities of urban challenges has pushed the “city,” i.e., its people, out of the “smart city” and rendered them as just “data points.” These people expect far more from a smart city, which has fallen short of their expectations. Calling the current version a “digital,” “connected,” or “IT” city may have been a better choice.

However, things look different in India compared to this global account. The country launched the world’s largest smart city initiative in 2015 to create 100 smart cities across all urban scales. While the development of technology infrastructure was one of the key focus areas of India’s Smart Cities Mission, it soon realized that technology is just a means to an end and not the end itself.

Indian smart cities quickly transcended beyond the technology-fitted appearance of conventional smart cities to become places that are putting children, pedestrians,

and cyclists at the heart of city planning; spearheading climate action; bringing greater transparency in governmental processes; developing resilience to natural, economic, and public health shocks; cultivating entrepreneurial ecosystems; and collaboratively prototyping their public spaces. In a nutshell, they are redefining “smartness” to respond to their people’s needs and are reclaiming the “city” in “smart city.”

The key driver of this shift has been the redesign of government policies, administrative processes, fiscal structures, space-making, and methods of public service delivery. In India, the three tiers of government—national, state, and city—have collectively redesigned these objects to provide the required creative and institutional autonomy to cities, aligned with the 74th Constitutional Amendment that devolves democratic powers to city governments.

These new forms of public sector design objects include a new implementation entity in every city called a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), responsible for all smart city activities and projects. Navigating through the complex governmental landscape, the SPV model has brought a profound transformation in how cities raise and manage their financial capital, providing ample leeway to experiment and be entrepreneurial.

Another significant design change has been the augmentation of cities’ capacity by employing horses for courses. More urban planners are now onboarded in the urban

Warangal, India The city transformed a dumpsite lot into a child-friendly park.

development discourse at national and city levels. This has enabled pluralistic planning practices, further resulting in the representation of diverse and historically underrepresented communities in decision-making discourse.

It is worth noting that technology and data empower planners to build an unbiased understanding of pluralism in cities.

More planning capacity has encouraged cities to abandon the traditional top-down approach to decision-making. Planners are now involving stakeholders and community members through new ways of communication and listening to their needs and aspirations to build consensus. These dialogues are imperative to achieve more equitable and effective planning outcomes.

“Placemaking Marathon” is one such planner-led initiative that demonstrates the success of collaborative action. Under this initiative, several smart cities have joined hands with local communities, nongovernmental organizations, academia, urban sector experts, and businesses to reimagine and transform their public spaces.

The mutually beneficial outcomes have not only renewed the sense of ownership among the community but also brought significant positive impacts. For instance, in Imphal, the capital of northeastern hilly state Manipur, more than 90% of people visiting a new ecofriendly micro-park created on a dumping lot agreed that the area had become safer for pedestrians. The success of such participatory initiatives has led to the practice

© GREATER WARANGAL SMART CITY CORPORATION LIMITED

of co-creation of cities’ built environment while disrupting the regular government processes like procurement and execution.

Peer learning is another feature of the new public sector design in India’s Smart Cities Mission. Facilitated by the national government, the exchange of success stories and challenges among planners and policymakers from different cities is creating new opportunities for practical learning. They are creating a network of urban practitioners and extending the idea of building “social capital” beyond their cities to create “widespread positive change.”

Cities in similar geographic regions are sharing resources, information, and support to engage with local communities, draft new policies, and raise investments.

India’s smart cities have created a new model of the smart city that rests on the foundational pillars of innovative public sector design and technology. While they have deployed extensive technological infrastructure for improved governance and evidence-based planning, their policies, implementation plans, institutional structures, and public engagement have distinguished them from the typical smart city image. Led by policymakers and planners rather than technology vendors, each of the 100 cities is on the path of addressing its problems and creating equitable, just, inclusive, and sustainable urban environments while deriving more value from fewer resources and keeping the public at its core.

Naman Sharma Bloomberg Harvard Summer Fellow Cambridge, Massachusetts Naman Sharma is a Master in Urban Planning candidate (2024) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He currently serves as a Bloomberg Harvard Summer Fellow in the Office of the Mayor, City of Riverside, California, supported by the prestigious Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. His fundamental belief in making cities better places to live for all guides his mission of empowering communities to harness their full potential. His professional and academic work reflects his commitment to improving the paradigms of urban growth by leveraging the amalgamation of design, policy, and technology.

Smart City Miami | 25

SUSTAINABLE GROWTH

TRANSFORMING URBAN LIVING: FROGEEX’S BLUEPRINT FOR RESILIENT, LIVABLE, AND SMART CITIES PRESENTATION BY JANA SKOKAN AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

In the dynamic landscape of urban development, the imperative to create resilient, livable, and smart cities has never been more pressing. Frogeex, a trailblazer in sustainable urban development, unveils a comprehensive strategy to navigate the intricacies of contemporary urban living. This holistic approach addresses the challenges posed by climate change and rapid urbanization and the need for innovative solutions in urban planning, harmonizing urban progress with nature’s wisdom.

Climate Challenges and Urbanization: A Symbiotic Relationship The global climate is undergoing unprecedented changes, with temperatures surpassing preindustrial levels by 1.2 degrees Celsius. Despite aspirational targets to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, current CO2 emission trends suggest a challenging trajectory. This phenomenon underscores the urgency for cities to fortify their infrastructure, materials, and overall preparedness for the escalating frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.

Urbanization plays a pivotal role in this scenario, with over 55% of the world’s population residing in urban areas—a figure projected to surge to 80%.

Astonishingly, cities cover a mere 2% of the Earth’s land yet consume a staggering 75% of its material resources. Consumption of resources is a major bottleneck in the narrative of infinite growth with limited resources. This reality necessitates a critical revaluation of urban planning paradigms to ensure truly sustainable living in our cities.

Defining Urban Resilience: A Multidimensional Challenge At Frogeex, we approach urban resilience as a multifaceted challenge encompassing changing climate conditions, water scarcity, food security, energy demands, health, and social stability. Beyond the immediate concerns, the impact on property values, 26 | Smart City Miami

insurability, and overall city dynamics demands a comprehensive strategy involving investors, developers, architects, and urban planners.

Building Blocks for Resilient Urban Futures To face and manage these challenges, we follow a structured approach comprising nature-based design, biodiversity integration, sustainable materials, and an understanding of urban metabolism. This foundation is strengthened by integrating sensors and cognitive city concepts, offering a holistic framework for cities to thrive in the face of emerging challenges and rapidly changing conditions.

Nature-Based Design: A Foundational Pillar Nature-based design serves as the bedrock for resilience, emphasizing understanding local contexts, climate, and potential risk.

It is the application of green and blue infrastructure with impressive results.

Increasing green coverage from the current European average tree coverage (foliage) of 15% to 30% in urban spaces would not only better regulate temperatures but also mitigate the impact of heat waves. Studies confirm this would prevent thousands of deaths due to extreme heat and surely increase overall urban comfort—not to mention both physical and mental benefits for citizens across the age groups, with numerous studies and mounting evidence to support that.

Biodiversity: The Overlooked Element in Urban Planning Biodiversity, often neglected in urban planning, emerges as a crucial aspect.

Frogeex advocates designing habitats that support the needs of species that provide essential ecosystem services. From green walls fostering bird habitats to innovative façades, urban planning must prioritize designs that promote biodiversity. The loss of biodiversity is a fatal yet underrated risk, with which we endanger the stable provision of ecosystem services like clean water due to sufficient riparian forests. This can increase chemical and mechanical treatment efforts and costs to deliver clean water to communities.

Materials: Beyond Aesthetics to Ecological Impact A comprehensive view of materials involves scrutinizing the entire supply chain, considering factors like renewability, local availability, and durability. The ecological implications of mass-scale application, sourcing, usage, and post-use (full LCA) must be included in the planning to ensure sustainable future-proof choices are made.

Urban Metabolism: Unveiling Flows for Circular Design Understanding urban metabolism— comprehending the inputs and outputs of a city—provides the groundwork for circular design models. With circularity, scans for neighboring business cooperation possibilities present themselves. Implementing

Sickla, Wood City, Sweden Wooden buildings provide better air quality, reduce stress, increase productivity, store carbon dioxide, quiet construction sites, and reduce heavy transports.

© ATRIUM LJUNGBERG

efficient circular systems helps cities minimize waste and enhances overall resilience by fostering sustainability in resource use.

Sensors and Cognitive Cities: Pioneering Smart Urban Management Incorporating sensors into urban infrastructure opens new frontiers for efficiency, optimization, and early problem identification. Frogeex asserts the pivotal role of sensors in predicting natural disasters, optimizing maintenance, and fostering a proactive, predictive urban management system. Sensors and environmental data sharing can also help gain support and educate businesses and citizens about the positive impacts of investing in climate change mitigation actions.

Cognitive cities transcend real-time monitoring by leveraging sensors and big data for proactive and predictive urban management. The continuous interaction between technology and residents requires

transparency to ensure the responsible use of data, transparent ownership, and value-added applications for citizens. Trust is instrumental.

Building resilience necessitates addressing the population’s needs, navigating regulations, and considering the elements of time and planning. Smart cities of the future empower people, businesses, and regulation with solutions and encompass a mix of immediate, medium-term, and strategic measures where we believe nature plays a pivotal role.

Future-Proof Mindset: Linear to Systemic The transition from linear to systemic thinking is essential to navigating the complexity of risk and opportunities in the urban environment.

Frogeex offers its expertise to assist in this transformative journey. While challenges loom large, the solutions lie within our reach.

Together, we have the power and all the tools to shape a future where cities thrive in harmony with nature.

© AESTHETICA STUDIO

‘Hyper-Abundant City’ at Apgujeong Waterfront, Seoul, South Korea This 100-year master plan was unveiled by RIOS at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture & Urbanism 2023.

Jana Skokan Co-Founder & Director, Frogeex Sisseln, Switzerland Jana Skokan is the co-founder of Frogeex, a powerful network of providers developing and delivering solutions to the population’s most pressing issues. It focuses on efficient adaptation and mitigation methods in the changing climatic conditions and the difference a well-designed built environment can make. As a mother, an economist, a system thinker, a marketer by experience, and a builder by family tradition, Skokan is dedicated to sustainable development and resilience concepts with ecological solutions, innovation, and smart urban planning founded on nature-based development. Her commitment reflects efficient, cost-effective solutions for businesses and municipalities.

Smart City Miami | 27

SUSTAINABLE GROWTH

SMART REGENERATIVE CITIES FOR A LOW-CARBON FUTURE PRESENTATION BY CARL WELTY AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Using historic case studies, we can incorporate solar-oriented design and natural systems to design buildings and communities using 50% to 80% less energy. Planning a community starting with solar orientation and working with the existing natural flow of stormwater produces more energyefficient buildings and more resilient communities at a lower development cost.

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s we seek to achieve an energyefficient, low-carbon future, we must learn what we can from great pre-industrial age cities that did not rely on external energy sources that produced hydrocarbon emissions. History provides many lessons on how to build lowcarbon cities that provide thermal comfort.

Across continents and cultures, we see that designers of ancient cities effectively exploited certain well-understood facts of nature: The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and it is higher in the sky in the summer and lower in the winter. Working with this fundamental reality, rather than ignoring it, ancient cultures built cities with east-west-oriented streets, and knowledge of solar-oriented design is demonstrated throughout the ancient world.

Socrates wrote of the importance of directing a well-designed home toward the sun and building a roof that provided shade in the summer and allowed the low winter sun’s free energy into the home. In our day, modern buildings and communities that emulate such simple practices consume less energy, are more resilient, and can be built for far less money than high-tech solutions.

Ancient cities also cooled buildings by carefully taking advantage of predictable nighttime breezes and the simple fact that heat rises. Wind cooling towers from ancient Persia are beautiful, natural cooling systems first constructed 3,000 years ago that can reduce indoor temperatures by up to 21 degrees Fahrenheit. Other time-tested ventilation systems have been seen in relief carvings from ancient Egypt and India.

Perhaps the most important lesson from

28 | Smart City Miami

history is that to achieve the best results, buildings need to take advantage of multiple systems simultaneously. A water feature combined with a well-designed ventilation system will reduce indoor temperatures more than ventilation by itself. Considering a garden, pool, or flowing water as part of a building’s thermal comfort system is foreign to our modern, post-industrial age approach to design, but landscaping and courtyards that were well-integrated with buildings and neighborhoods were found throughout ancient cultures in the Mediterranean, India, China, the Americas, and other cultures in every climate zone.

These practices do not only reduce indoor temperatures; if implemented widely, gardens and landscapes can be integrated with

Dholavira, India This 5,500-year-old UNESCO World Heritage Site in northeast India had a sophisticated reservoir system.

architecture to cool the ambient temperature of entire neighborhoods or cities. They also can provide an abundance of fruits and dramatically transform soil health. Examples from cities in multiple climate zones have proven that careful landscape and courtyard design can reduce both indoor and outdoor temperatures by up to 15 degrees Fahrenheit, providing practical techniques for designing in our modern age.

Dholavira is a 5,500-year-old archaeological site in northeast India. Like many cities in the ancient world, it was organized with an east-west-oriented street pattern and includes a sophisticated water capture and storage system. Integrating these two elements created a long-lasting urban center. Without the ability to

© ASI/UNESCO

Dholavira, India This ancient Indian city perfectly demonstrates the importance of an integrated water- and solar-oriented designed community.

mechanically heat and cool spaces or pump water great distances, our ancient ancestors discovered simple solutions to provide thermal comfort and water for survival.

Passive solar design incorporates eastwest orientation, locates most windows to face the sun, and uses roof overhangs that are carefully calibrated to manage seasonal heat gain in both summer and winter. Such buildings are typically 50% to 80% more energy efficient than conventional baseline buildings. Modern examples of passive solar buildings demonstrate these ancient techniques that work in cooperation with nature produce buildings that are more efficient, resilient, and cost-effective than popular modern technologies that instead try to resist and overpower natural systems.

Village Homes, a 220-home development in Davis, California, constructed in 1975, is perhaps the best example of a community with solar-oriented buildings, a wellintegrated landscape, and well-planned stormwater capture and storage. Together, these have yielded a radical reduction of energy use for thermal comfort, a cooler ambient temperature, healthy soil, and an eminently livable social environment. As a 50-year-old but still modern community, it serves as a case study for the effectiveness of these principles as we look to build cities that will be healthy and vibrant 50 years into the future and beyond.

The east-west street pattern in Village Homes is laid out to provide solar access to 100% of the structures. The site was designed to capture stormwater and direct it to collection ponds and, from there, to a

“WITHOUT THE ABILITY TO MECHANICALLY HEAT AND COOL SPACES OR PUMP WATER GREAT DISTANCES, OUR ANCIENT ANCESTORS DISCOVERED SIMPLE SOLUTIONS TO PROVIDE THERMAL COMFORT AND WATER FOR SURVIVAL.”

landscape of thriving trees and moist, rich soil. This holistic approach to stormwater eliminated the need for subterranean concrete drain pipes, saving the developer $200,000—funds that were instead used to purchase 300 fruit trees. This set in motion an ecosystem that decades later provides an abundance of food while cooling the community’s ambient temperature by 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit in a very hot area of California’s Central Valley.

Concrete drain pipes, like other modern technologies, are meant to solve one problem at a time. Village Homes demonstrates what is possible when communities work with nature to solve multiple problems simultaneously. The orientation of the buildings and streets directs water flow properly, allowing healthy soil and trees to thrive as one ecosystem. The soil has improved over time, producing more and better-quality fruit, reducing the potential of flooding by absorbing water more quickly and increasing the shade that cools the neighborhood. Village Homes is a model for future smart cities on this warming planet.

Passive solar principles, natural ventilation, and integrated water capture and storage can all be creatively integrated into contemporary architecture. Complex technologies can be used to enhance performance or reduce consumption of off-site energy, but by themselves, they cannot achieve the same performance as buildings that fundamentally cooperate with natural systems. It is crucial that we look to ancient cultures for lessons in low-emission functionality that works in every climate zone.

Carl Welty Architect, Carl Welty Architects Pomona, California Carl Welty works in Southern California and has over 35 years of experience in the field of architecture. He is committed to creating an architecture that connects human beings to nature not as outside observers but as full partners in the complex web of nature’s closed-loop systems. Designing in partnership with nature means more than building efficient buildings that consume fewer resources: Wasting less is good, but we can do better than just wasting less. Welty is a proponent of regenerative design, the idea that we can create buildings and communities that generate more resources (energy, water, and building materials) and, at the same time, restore native habitat. Welty brings his expertise in energy-efficient and resilient design to all his work and is available to consult with other designers to optimize resources to build a lowcarbon future.

Smart City Miami | 29

SUSTAINABLE GROWTH

A FUTURE VISION OF MIAMI COMMITTED TO NATURAL INFRASTRUCTURE PRESENTATION BY AARON J. DEMAYO AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

What does it take to build for the future? Will we reach a point where it is no longer feasible? Green infrastructure reintroduces solutions and ecosystems that have evolved over millennia back into the urban environments that often destroyed them. Holistic designs addressing various issues will allow us to protect our homes while providing time to make long-term investments for Miami’s future.

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iami is known for its picturesque scenery, from coral reefs and sandy beaches to waterfrontshaded parks, mangroves, pine rocklands, and wetlands. As human activity continues to impact the ecology, exacerbated by climate change, attention turns toward the environment and quality of life.

Challenges in Current Infrastructure As existing gray infrastructure becomes overwhelmed by significant rain events, it negatively impacts the environment, leading to extensive flooding that damages property and washes away sediment and nutrients from Biscayne Bay. More hot days cause people to use their air conditioners more frequently, creating a negative feedback loop of increased energy use. Higher temperatures also strain the bay, leading to fish die-offs.

Can Infrastructure Create Healthier Neighborhoods and Ecosystems?

Future Vision Studios designs solutions across scales, reintegrating natural ecosystems developed over millennia. The solutions must be integrated into public spaces and the private sector. New requirements are needed but can be challenging to create as there is often opposition to additional project costs.

Utilizing zoning incentives in exchange for resilience adaptations within development can lead to more frequent implementation.

Green Roofs, Many Benefits The current zoning in the City of Miami allows for access, indoor enclosed rooms, and shade

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structures on the roofs of many buildings. As the city densifies on high ground, open space often decreases. There is demand for open space and vegetation on the tops of buildings.

Developers desire to create the requested spaces but are limited by zoning allowances.

We can create a win-win scenario by allowing additional enclosed areas on roofs in exchange for creating green roofs. Residents will have better indoor and outdoor amenities, and new businesses can open on some roofs, creating jobs and more enjoyable destinations for the community. Green roofs can lengthen the life of a roof, reduce the heat island effect, increase habitat for birds and insects, and hold rainwater like a sponge to slowly release it, reducing flooding effects.

Holistic Approaches to Neighborhood Resilience Miami has many low-lying areas, and different strategies and timelines are needed to allow them to adapt. Some places will be too costly to preserve and will be abandoned. In the meantime, how can small-scale adaptations efficiently increase their life spans?

Coconut Grove has some of the highest and lowest topography in the county, a mere few hundred feet apart. That low waterfront ground has previously been inundated by storm surge. Creating a holistic approach to raising the seawall around this low-lying area may increase the life span of many residences and be more economical than adding flood panels to each structure. But rather than only raising the seawalls, which have been

shown not to diffuse but redistribute wave energy, we chose a more natural approach for a small piece of public land. During a recent event, this 50-foot-wide property acted as a conduit for storm surge waters.

We are building an earthen berm 4 feet tall at its peak above the existing ground level. It will have a gradual slope on each side with an ADA-accessible pathway. The slope will be planted with dense native foliage and should assist with lessening storm surges and creating new native habitats.

Regional Scale: Adapting to Sea-Level Rise & Preparing for Storm Surge Storm surge is compounded as sea levels rise. South Florida has a massive amount of property at risk. Many areas will need to be adapted, protected, and retreated from. Often, smaller-scale adaptations are developed that help in the short term but will likely not suffice with more significant sealevel rise. These Band-Aid approaches are capital-intensive, requiring money, materials, and human attention. We propose a holistic approach to sea-level rise and storm surge.

Five locations have an outsized impact on water flow. The mouth of the Miami River affects the entire Miami River basin. Four locations regulate flow from the ocean in and out of Biscayne Bay: on either side of I-395, at the Haulover Inlet, and in Broward County at the Stranahan River. By creating tidal locks at these locations and reinforcing a hybrid levee berm that connects to the Miami Beach barrier island, we can safeguard hundreds

of miles of waterfront properties with limited intervention. We can reintroduce native mangrove and wetland ecosystems along an earthen berm to fortify the coastline. This will also strengthen local ecosystems by creating miles of natural coastline that was once in these locations. The locks can be closed during significant storm events.

Sustainable Future This large-scale adaptation will allow dozens of waterfront communities to focus on longterm comprehensive planning. This should also lessen the risks and, thus, insurance costs, and likely protect properties for longer than a 30-year mortgage. In this way, communities can proactively address which areas need to be retreated and which roadways should be raised. A 20-, 30-, or even 40-year timeline based on sea-level rise projections, where places will be reallocated as parks, roads will be raised, and migration should occur, provides time for new infrastructure to be

Miami, Florida An example of flooding in Miami during a king tide rain event.

adequately planned for and finances saved to build it. For instance, land use and zoning policies can be introduced to require new developments to be built to a certain height to align with the planned roadways and incentivize residents to migrate to denser mixed-use communities on higher ground.

Realistic Bold Leadership In the face of these challenges, policymakers, businesses, and community leaders must put the right analytics, processes, and governance in place to properly assess climate risk and realistically plan how to adapt to comprehensive long-term solutions. South Florida cannot afford to wait to act. The cities that act the most expeditiously and judiciously will have the best chance for success. We can implement a holistic, comprehensive strategy that considers the intertwined social, economic, and environmental impacts to safeguard our community and act as leaders at the forefront of a changing planet.

Aaron J. DeMayo Founder, Future Vision Studios Miami, Florida Aaron DeMayo, AICP Candidate, Assoc.

AIA, WEDG, is a multidisciplinary designer passionate about creating healthy, sustainable, economically productive, and enjoyable neighborhoods. Born and raised in Miami, he has seen the city transform into a bustling subtropical metropolis.

Having worked with many companies in diverse roles that shape the built environment, he has developed a holistic understanding of a city’s complex processes, allowing him to work across various scales and typologies. As founder of Future Vision Studios, he oversees projects, including architectural design, urban planning, mobility, resilience adaptation, and zoning policy. He serves on and is the chair of multiple committees, boards, and working groups and was recently awarded 2023 Young Urbanist of the Year by AIA, Miami Center for Architecture & Design.

Smart City Miami | 31

SUSTAINABLE GROWTH

FROM SMART CITY TO COGNITIVE CITY PRESENTATION BY URI BEN-ARI AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

There is a shift from smart cities to cognitive cities, where technology not only improves infrastructure but also empowers its citizens. Cognitive cities will have features such as hyperscale data centers, secure 5G and satellite connectivity, mixed reality metaverses and digital twin technology, and advanced artificial intelligence.

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s a smart city consultant, I have been consulting mayors and their staff for the last 10 years, mainly in Israel. I have coached eight of Israel’s top cities’ management staff. In a 2018 smart cities survey led by Reichman University (IDC) and Deloitte, most of those cities were ranked among the leading smart cities in Israel.

I have also published a few articles in smart city magazines over the years, mostly about the role of the mayor in becoming a smart city but also about the role of the CIO, which is very crucial for the success of a smart city.

In Israel, we started developing smart cities in 2012. Tel Aviv and Eilat were the first to create strategic plans (I was involved in Eilat). Later, a few other cities where I was involved developed their own plans, such as Jerusalem, Ashdod, Netanya, Haifa, Rishon LeZion, and Lod. I also consulted Tel Aviv’s IT and education divisions on computing issues. In 2014, Tel Aviv won the contest as the world’s smartest city at Smart City Expo. The Israeli government joined at a very early stage and supported smart city developments in the country.

I think the most important issue a city faces is improving the quality of life for its citizens.

The major goals are to increase employability, resilience, sustainability, and livability.

When we speak about a smart city, we must understand its characteristics. We must consider that citizens must be at the center of all decisions, and there must be a process of sustainability, innovation, entrepreneurship, and cooperation between city management and the citizens. We also have to care for the city’s resilience.

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The Evolution of the Smart City Smart city development started around 2012 all over the world, mostly in Europe, with new technologies and technological solutions such as LED lighting, sensors, cameras, waste management, new IT systems, Wi-Fi, smart cameras for security and traffic control, and other mobility solutions. This was the first stage in most smart cities, including in Israel.

Smart cities moved forward to take care of their infrastructure, transportation, and mobility, which is still one of the most critical issues. They started taking care of energy saving and developing new sources of renewable energy and education and economic solutions, mostly around innovation, which is very important to increase the city’s employability. In addition, they looked for security and health technological solutions.

Dubai was the first government to declare that it had set the “happiness” of its citizens as its goal for its smart city strategy, and it wanted to become the first city in the world to achieve this goal.

The next stage of smart cities was to achieve a higher rate of citizen participation in the decision-making process. We can see this more as cities develop hubs and new startups to increase innovation and employability and develop smart economies.

Cognitive City The new stage for smart cities started a few years ago when they started moving toward a knowledge-based cognitive city that can utilize all the collected data and turn it into action and a prediction model for citizens’ benefits.

Cognition is the “mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding

© NEOM

through thought, experience, and the senses.”

The leading city at this stage of smart city development is Neom in Saudi Arabia, on the Red Sea. Neom is becoming the world’s first cognitive city. It’s quite large, covering over 10,000 square miles. The leaders took the best minds from 38 countries to develop this new system that is being built based on prediction. They are trying to predict the needs of the people and bring them “on time” or even before they think about it. The goal is to save time for citizens and improve their quality of life.

Over $500 billion has been invested in this project, which may be the largest in the world. The project will be powered by 100% renewable energy and house the world’s largest skyscraper. It will be the first zerogravity, zero-carbon vertical city, which will be 656 feet wide and extend over 105 miles.

It will be a vertical layered building structure that will house 9 million residents by 2045.

Just imagine that residents will have access to all the facilities within a five-minute walk, utilizing renewable energy and a high-speed train with 20 minutes of end-to-end transit.

This cognitive city will be based on efficient, secure, and hyperscale data centers, secure 5G, high-speed fiber, and satellite connectivity. It will use immersive and mixed reality, metaverse and digital twin technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced robotics, and powerful data discovery, ensuring platforms among the various parts of this city.

Tonomus is managing this new cognitive city development. As a subsidiary of Neom, it is run by CEO Joseph Bradley, who took the best minds in the world to plan and implement it.

The Line, Neom, Saudi Arabia The 110-mile-long city redefines the concept of urban development and what cities of the future will look like.

“I THINK THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE A CITY FACES IS IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF LIFE FOR ITS CITIZENS...

TO INCREASE EMPLOYABILITY, RESILIENCE, SUSTAINABILITY, AND LIVABILITY.”

Neom, Saudi Arabia Dubbed the “first cognitive city,” the 10,000-square-mile city will be powered by 100% renewable energy.

Uri Ben-Ari CEO, UBA Ventures Tel Aviv, Israel

© NEOM

The Line, Neom, Saudi Arabia Neom will be the first zero-gravity, zero-carbon vertical city, which is said to house 9 million residents by 2045.

Uri Ben-Ari is a seasoned international business executive with 30 years of experience in senior management and entrepreneurship. Over his career, he has undertaken senior management and business/market development activities in the U.S., Europe, Israel, India, and the Far East. He serves as chairman, director, investor, and/or strategic consultant for international business development at a number of public and private technology companies and has been assisting high-tech companies achieve success in the global arena by either direct investment or by consulting their management teams. Ben-Ari is an expert in the area of “smart cities.” Over the last few years, he has aided cities in becoming smart using methodologies he developed in tandem with models developed by leading universities and research institutes in Europe.

© NEOM

Smart City Miami | 33

RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE

A DATA-DRIVEN HYBRID SHORELINE INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENHANCE COASTAL RESILIENCE PRESENTATION BY SARA PEZESHK AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Coastal areas are increasingly vulnerable to climate change, facing rising sea levels and extreme weather events. While conventional hard infrastructure solutions effectively combat erosion, they often harm coastal ecosystems. This article introduces research on a hybrid coastal protection method, integrating natural elements with eco-friendly concrete bio-tiles. The ongoing project aims to refine designs, balancing infrastructure resilience, ecological health, and community needs.

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lobal coastlines are under mounting pressure from climate change, experiencing coastal erosion, flooding, and habitat degradation due to rising sea levels.

Traditional hard engineering approaches, exemplified by concrete seawalls, can mitigate erosion but often disrupt ecosystems, exacerbating long-term vulnerabilities. This necessitates the development of hybrid methods that provide coastal protection, enhance ecological functioning, and accommodate human activities. The research showcases a data-driven design methodology, creating modular, sustainable, nature-based solutions that restore coastal ecosystems and foster community adaptation to climate change. The ultimate objective is to establish resilient, ecologically interactive shorelines.

Project The bio-tiles served as a multifunctional coastal protection system, seamlessly integrating concrete infrastructure with natural organisms such as mangroves, salt marsh, and seagrass to establish a resilient and visually appealing shoreline. The development process incorporated several strategies to achieve coastal reliance and enhance biodiversity. To promote the growth of microorganisms and enhance biodiversity, the design integrated microclimatic data and improved concrete mix sustainability. Digital models underwent rigorous testing through Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid

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Dynamics (CFD) programs to simulate and evaluate the behavior of bio-tiles under wave and wind impact forces before manufacturing.

The project also sought to restore natural plant life in a manner that seamlessly integrated with the surrounding ecosystem, fostering a cohesive and self-organizing system. Insights from expert interviews and case studies on successful rehabilitation efforts guided this restoration initiative. Three critical factors for success emerged: 1) structure and form, 2) materiality, and 3) environmental stimuli. Prototypes, including the Bio-Marine Solid Tile (capable of withstanding water and wind to prevent erosion), Hollow Tile absorbing sediment runoff, and Bio-Pod facilitating mangrove growth, were developed to form a resilient and eco-friendly landscape. The bio-seagrass prototype aimed to promote seagrass growth, contributing to erosion protection, biodiversity enhancement, stormwater filtration, sediment retention, and restoration of mangroves and seagrass.

To assess design and performance, the bio-tiles were strategically placed on the North Biscayne Bay shoreline at the FIU BBC campus, a location susceptible to various coastal challenges. The prototypes, featuring different geometries, structures, digital manufacturing methods, materials, and textures, were monitored to evaluate their impact on erosion and marine fauna. The data collected provided valuable insights into the success of the project. Notably, the bio-tiles

exhibited a favorable outcome, paving the way for the continued development of this approach for the protection and restoration of other ecosystems facing similar challenges.

Methods The design process integrated computational optimization, material science, and field testing. Using data from buoys, USGS, and GIS, microclimate factors such as water flow, turbidity, and solar exposure were modeled.

This informed the algorithmic generation of a Voronoi bio-tile system, optimizing parameters like height and slope. Prototypes were fabricated with various concrete mixtures and textures and installed in a tidal zone for ecological impact monitoring. A sustainable concrete mix was also developed, reducing cement and incorporating alternate aggregates and binders for improved durability and longevity.

Results The bio-tile system exhibited erosion reduction, storm surge absorption, water filtration, and marine life encouragement features.

Sustainable concrete mixes demonstrated increased biodiversity, with textured tiles showing significantly more growth of algae, barnacles, oysters, and other species compared to flat control tiles. Field monitoring over two years confirmed a more significant colonization of textured tiles by various marine organisms. The data revealed compelling insights into the ecological enhancements

Ecoblox Ecoblox is an innovative modular block system for shorelines, advancing seawall design through AI-optimized modular construction.

© ECOBLOX

achieved through surface design. Moreover, bar graphs were utilized to present the counts of oysters, barnacles, and limpets on three tile surface designs. The data demonstrates that the textured tiles consistently recorded higher counts of these organisms than the flat tiles.

These findings provide concrete evidence of the positive influence of surface texture on the colonization and growth of diverse marine species, further validating the ecological benefits associated with the implementation of textured tile surface designs.

Proposed Expanded Research Future research will examine vertical seawall solutions using similar principles. Generative design, machine learning, and iterative physical testing will refine the system.

Interlocking vertical and horizontal modules will aim to protect coasts while enhancing ecological growth and public experience. As climate change and coastal erosion continue impacting ecosystems, fostering innovative coastal infrastructure is critical. Advanced technologies like real-time sensing, big data analytics, and robotic manufacturing enable data-driven solutions that minimize ecological harm while enabling sustainable development.

This proposal outlines a data-driven design approach leveraging technology advancements to research, develop, and test an innovative interlocking “Biocap” modular block system. The project aims to create a cohesive infrastructure integrating supratidal and tidal zones. It seeks an adaptive, efficient,

sustainable system for marine environments by combining optimization, microclimate data, innovative materials, robotic fabrication, and testing. Key objectives are: 1) Research design factors and concrete impacts; 2) collect and analyze data to inform designs; 3) apply algorithms for optimization; 4) construct and test prototypes; and 5) evaluate sustainability impacts.

Deliverables will be optimized designs, prototype assessments, data visualization tools, and community workshops. Outcomes aim to improve coastal conditions through enhanced biodiversity, erosion resistance, sediment capture, and public education.

Conclusion As natural disasters and climate impacts intensify, a recalibrated approach to resilience in the built environment becomes imperative.

This research introduces a novel methodology for developing resilient, ecologically beneficial coastal infrastructure through interdisciplinary integration. Creative approaches that blend data-driven optimization, material science, new construction technology, and stakeholder participation are essential to address the impacts of climate change on vulnerable coastal regions.

Acknowledgment: This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Award No. 2329345: CREST-PRP. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

Sara Pezeshk Post-Doctoral Fellow, FIU School of Architecture Miami, Florida Sara Pezeshk is a post-doctoral candidate at CREST Center for Aquatic Chemistry and Environment and Institute of Environment at FIU. In her doctorate project, “Performance-Based Hybrid Shorelines,” she delved into data-driven generative computation design and the integration of biomimetic approaches with material systems. By leveraging the inherent code found in nature, she aimed to engineer solutions for resilient coastlines. The project focused on developing strategies to safeguard coastal areas from the adverse effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, coastal erosion, sedimentation, water contamination, frequent floods, and species depopulation.

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RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE

TOWARD NET-ZERO IMPACT:

DESIGNING FOR URBAN RESILIENCE PANEL AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI: BIAYNA BOGOSIAN, SARA PEZESHK, THOMAS SPIEGELHALTER & MARILYS NEPOMECHIE (MODERATOR)

Florida International University’s School of Architecture is in the process of training, educating, and encouraging students to design in ways that create more resilient and, ideally, smarter cities.

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uring Smart City Expo Miami, four members of Florida International University School of Architecture held a special panel speaking about their processes of training, educating, conversing with, and encouraging their students to design in ways that create more resilient and smarter cities.

This particular group teaches a

graduate course on sustainable design, where students are challenged to design buildings, landscapes, and infrastructures that are net-zero in their impact on the environment.

It’s a tall order that not only looks at processes, methods, and materials for designing and building but also looks forward to the potential impact that the

Panelists Sara Pezeshk, Biayna Bogosian, Marilys Nepomechie (moderator), and Thomas Spiegelhalter at Smart City Expo Miami

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decisions an architecture student and, ultimately, an architect make might have on the built environment as a whole.

During the panel, which was moderated

by Professor Marilys Nepomechie, each panelist spoke about the work and research in which they’re currently engaged and how they bring that research to their work with students.

Biayna Bogosian at Smart City Expo Miami with fellow panelists Sara Pezeshk, Marilys Nepomechie (moderator), and Thomas Spiegelhalter at Smart City Expo Miami

REFLECTIONS ON THE CRITICAL ROLE OF DATA, DESIGN AND COMPUTATION IN ACHIEVING NET-ZERO GOALS PRESENTATION BY BIAYNA BOGOSIAN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGY, FIU SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

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chieving net-zero environmental impact necessitates critical examination across multiple interconnected dimensions.

Reviewing data, design processes, and computational models is essential to inform evidence-based pathways aligned with sustainability goals.

Comprehensive data collection and transparency are foundational. Leveraging diverse public and private data sources provides a multifaceted picture of current impacts across sectors like energy, transportation, buildings, etc. However, critical analysis must evaluate potential gaps, biases, uncertainties, and limitations in these datasets. Establishing robust metadata, quantification of confidence levels, and identifying high-value new data to support decision-making is critical.

Additionally, the design of engagement platforms and decision support systems must be critically assessed. User-centered design considering diverse stakeholders’ needs and perspectives is crucial. Advances in immersive technologies can enhance understanding and participation but require

critical evaluation regarding equitable access and avoidance of counterproductive outcomes. Developing inclusive educational resources for climate literacy promotes wellinformed collaboration.

Similarly, examining computational tools for modeling net-zero scenarios is imperative. Verifying model assumptions, inputs, and appropriate uncertainty quantification is vital to prevent unrealistic projections. Computational capabilities should be benchmarked about the complex, multiscale systems involved.

Code transparency and peer review further bolster credibility.

Integrating these elements also necessitates a critical eye. Proposed policies and interventions must be scrutinized for unintended consequences. Trade-offs between economic, technical, and social factors require balanced weighing guided by ethics. A systems-thinking perspective critically investigates interactions and feedback.

This comprehensive criticality underpins constructive dialogues on net-zero pathways. It enables the identification

of the most urgent priorities, impactful policies, and multifaceted co-benefits.

Critical assessment and improvement of equitable community engagement and education processes are also crucial. More than ever, bringing a rigorously critical lens across data, design, and computation is vital in realizing evidence-based, transparent, and just solutions.

“ESTABLISHING ROBUST METADATA, QUANTIFICATION OF CONFIDENCE LEVELS, AND IDENTIFYING HIGH-VALUE NEW DATA TO SUPPORT DECISION-MAKING IS CRITICAL.” Smart City Miami | 37

RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE © FIU

Starlet Coral Pavilion For the Miami Floating Housing Competition, Arch OUT LOUD called designers to propose solutions for floating housing in Biscayne Bay. This project was conceived by FIU students Cailin Reto and Karyn Castane.

PREPARING ARCHITECTS TO DESIGN RESILIENT AND SUSTAINABLE BUILT ENVIRONMENTS PRESENTATION BY SARA PEZESHK, POST-DOCTORAL FELLOW, FIU SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

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ur built environments face escalating pressures. To develop solutions, we need an integrated approach focused on resilience. This research examines strategies spanning performance optimization, sustainable materials, ecological design, and digital fabrication.

The goal is to equip students to create adaptive, efficient structures in harmony with environmental needs.

Performance-based design prioritizes functionality, considering resilience, flexibility, energy efficiency, and passive survivability. Material selection is also crucial, using durable, eco-friendly options like advanced composites to withstand stresses or recycled materials. An ecological perspective examines how designs interact with natural systems using strategies like biomimicry, green infrastructure, and energy cascades. Digital fabrication enables precision construction for optimization, exploiting technologies like 3D printing, CNC milling, and robotics to fabricate highperformance components.

38 | Smart City Miami

However, work remains to disseminate these techniques into the mainstream. Our teaching and research seek to inspire future designers to implement these strategies through an immersive, hands-on curriculum. The studio environment facilitates deep exploration of concepts like optimization, biomimicry, formfinding, and environmental analysis using BIM tools. This instills core competencies: • Biomimicry and Sustainability: Studying natural design principles promotes ecological solutions adapted from evolved efficiency.

• Digital Fabrication and Material Systems: Exploring computational methods and materials inspires sustainable construction innovations in modularization and adaptive facades.

• Experiential Learning: Hands-on activities engage students in applying sustainable design to craft architectural responses rooted in place and climate.

• Optimization and Functionality: Focusing on performance metrics and efficiency teaches students to maximize buildings’ environmental benefits.

• Integration of Energy Analysis: BIM tools teach students to design energyefficient, net-zero structures optimized for solar radiation, natural ventilation, and passive heating/cooling.

Additionally, by integrating digital fabrication, students gain the ability to exploit advanced manufacturing techniques to pursue innovative material systems and construction methods that minimize waste and embodied energy.

This digitally driven approach promotes the use of bio-based materials, massively reusable components, and high-performance systems without traceability. Ultimately, coupling environmental analysis with ecological knowledge and digital tools allows students to design integrated architecture that leverages technology and nature. The skills gained pave the way for creating highly functional, sustainable structures that withstand and adapt to changing conditions. With climate change and resource scarcity presenting considerable challenges for the built environment, this forward-looking architectural education model develops the designers needed to create a more resilient world.

Thomas Spiegelhalter at Smart City Expo Miami

ENVISIONING CARBONPOSITIVE MASTERPLANS:

GREEN-BLUE INFRASTRUCTURES AND ADAPTIVE BUILDINGS IN MIAMI (2023-2100) PRESENTATION BY THOMAS SPIEGELHALTER, PROFESSOR, FIU SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

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y research has been funded by entities such as the National Science Foundation, Horizon 2020, Intelligent Europe, and the Belmont Forum. A recent project engaging over 180 design studio master’s students, Ph.D. candidates, and international consultants aims to develop carbon-positive solutions for the cities of Miami, Miami Beach, and South Miami’s green-blue infrastructure, adaptable buildings, and landscapes through 2100 and beyond.

My research included creating digital twins and surrogate models of city districts to conceptualize carbon-positive scenarios.

In collaboration with the FIU GIS Center, my team developed the “Integrated Decision Support System (IDSS)” beta app, a platform that allows stakeholders, decision-makers, and citizens to select and run data-driven scenarios for 2030, 2070, and 2100, simulating the impact of sea level rise, hurricanes, and heat waves on infrastructure and neighborhoods and

envisioning a resilient, carbon-positive, and renewable energy-operated built and natural environment.

These models have been displayed and discussed at esteemed events like the Venice Architecture Biennale, UIA World Congress of Architects in Rio, AIA Miami, and various universities and professional organizations of architecture, engineering and construction industries in Berlin, Amsterdam, and London.

The Blue-Green Infrastructures Project, led by the FIU Carbon-Positive Research Design Studio, is a component of the Climate Resilient Urban Nexus Choices (CRUNCH) initiative, which aims to bolster urban resilience by incorporating food, water, and energy sectors through the Urban Living Labs (ULL) methodology, supporting decision-makers in policy formulation.

The Miami segment of this initiative is devoted to creating a carbon-neutral planning tool for comprehensive urban decision-making. Using generative

AI-SynBio methods, the team is establishing community-involved Urban Living Labs in four cities, promoting sustainable urban environments.

My previous work includes off-grid, solar-powered, carbon-neutral buildings in Germany and contributions to projects in Costa Rica from the 1990s until today.

I referenced “The Limits to Growth,” a depiction of Earth’s biosphere and the depletion of resources from 1900 to 2100.

This 1972 Club of Rome report explored the potential outcomes of exponential economic and population growth against a backdrop of finite resources using the first World3 computer model.

I also contributed to the carbon-neutral Smart City Vision 2 project in Kigali, Rwanda, a recipient of an international award for sustainable development. All of these instances emphasize the tangible possibility of carbon-neutral and resilient urban solutions on a global scale and, in particular, in Miami.

Smart City Miami | 39

RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE Alan Scott at Smart City Expo Miami

RESILIENT URBAN ENVIRONMENTS:

A DISASTER IS A HAZARD YOU DIDN’T PREPARE FOR PRESENTATION BY ALAN SCOTT AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Given the increasing frequency and severity of natural hazards and the dire predictions of climate scientists that things will get worse, we need to accelerate climate change mitigation and simultaneously get serious about resilience to reduce potentially catastrophic risks. Fortunately, when we look at urban environments, there is overlap in mitigation and resilient adaptation strategies. This article explores this process.

T

he word disaster implies something unavoidable. I prefer to say “hazard” because hazards can be anticipated and prepared for to minimize potential risks so they don’t become disasters. Unfortunately, we are not very good at judging and acting on risks. Two behavioral science concepts illustrate this.

The first, the availability heuristic, describes our tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an occurrence by how easy it is to imagine or remember it happening in the past. The second is called the optimism bias, which leads us to underestimate the likelihood of a bad thing happening to us compared to the chance of it happening to someone else. In short, we typically assess risk based on feelings rather than data.

This often serves us well. For example, we can’t quickly calculate the speed and distance of oncoming cars before crossing a busy street, so we make snap judgments based on experience. But sometimes, this gut-check approach can steer us wrong. This is clearly happening with our individual and collective response to climate change and natural hazards.

Climate change presents an existential threat to human civilization, but because the impacts are often framed in terms of events in the distant future, like sea level rise projections for the end of the century, we cannot adequately process and act on the

40 | Smart City Miami

threats. Of course, the risks of climate change are here and now.

The frequency and severity of natural hazards are increasing. 2023 has already broken the previous record for billion-dollarplus disasters, with 24 deadly and costly disasters as of September. This year also saw the hottest summer ever recorded.

Despite this in-your-face threat, we still struggle to acknowledge the real risks and act on them. There are three shortcomings in our assessment of climate and natural hazard risks.

First, our emergency management system is built around preparedness for the acute hazard events we have faced in the past, not the ones we now face and those anticipated in the future. We are driving rapidly toward a brave new world of climate change with our eyes fixed squarely on the rearview mirror.

Second, we tend to focus on preparedness for individual hazard events rather than recognizing the likely compounding and cascading impacts of multiple, interconnected hazards. For example, prolonged droughts can coincide with extreme heat events.

Droughts may limit cooling water for power plants, causing blackouts when high heat increases electricity demand for air-conditioning. Extreme heat can also spawn violent storms, sparking wildfires with lightning or downed power lines. Wildfires then threaten structures locally and create

widespread hazardous air quality. The recent tragedy in Lahaina, Maui, is a heartbreaking example of interconnected hazards.

Thirdly, we tend to focus on acute hazard events rather than slowly developing chronic ones like those associated with climate change.

For example, Mexico City has made significant efforts to prepare for earthquakes but has given limited attention to acknowledging and acting on its looming water crisis. If trends continue, the city will hit its “zero water day” in just five years, yet adoption of water-saving technologies is still uncommon.

We must implement effective, complementary strategies to increase resilience while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

To do this, we must abandon gut-level risk assessment and instead use systems thinking, combining quality risk and vulnerability data with coordinated public and private initiatives.

Unfortunately, we often take a siloed approach. Without a public initiative, some private entities may invest in their own resilience and come through hazards unscathed, but they then find themselves castaways, surrounded by a devastated community. Conversely, public entities may harden infrastructure and develop emergency response plans. However, households and businesses typically don’t perceive the full risk, may not have the resources to invest in preparedness, and assume that government and insurance will take care of them if

Example of Heat Island Reduction & Thermal Resilience in Cities

something happens, which is not always true.

Resilient infrastructure is of little value if no community is left to serve. We need to think of resilience as a system with public and private components working together.

Without a collective approach, communities spiral down after hazard events.

Homeowners and businesses find they are unor underinsured and unable to get financing to rebuild, and they move away. The tax base shrinks, and services suffer. The community begins to look risky to insurers and investors and declines further. Even if a community can rebuild, the pressure is on to do it quickly, so limited time and money means things are rebuilt to the previous state without resilience enhancements, setting the stage for another disaster. A proactive approach to resilience spurs growth and investment, manages risks, and leads to long-term prosperity.

Communities must start to assess current and emerging risks, both at the asset and community scale, revealing the greatest vulnerabilities, and then begin prioritizing and implementing resilience measures in a coordinated fashion. These high-resilience communities can then bounce back quickly after a hazard event, returning to normal or even rebuilding stronger, unlike low-resilience communities that will endure slow and arduous recoveries.

The National Institute of Building Sciences estimates that every dollar invested in

resilience saves $4 to $10 or more after a hazard event. This investment must focus on the most effective mitigation strategies for the specific risks and vulnerabilities faced. Good data will guide integrated design thinking and sound investments in combined resilience and climate change mitigation strategies.

For example, extreme heat is one of the most deadly and ubiquitous threats from climate change. Reducing urban heat islands and improving the thermal resilience of buildings will diminish this public health risk while reducing the demand for air-conditioning along with associated greenhouse gas emissions.

Many natural hazard events are accompanied by prolonged power outages that, at best, delay recovery and, at worst, can be deadly. The distributed renewable energy generation and energy storage we need for continuity of operations after major hazard events will also provide cheap, clean energy for everyday operations.

Making our cities and the buildings within them resilient is not cheap or easy, but it is significantly less expensive and less complicated to do this proactively, collectively, and systematically before hazards occur, rather than waiting for a disaster and scrambling to pick up the pieces. We can do this by understanding the real risks we face and working together to address them. Isn’t this what we mean by a smart city?

Alan Scott Director of Sustainability, Intertek Portland, Oregon Alan Scott, FAIA, LEED Fellow, LEED AP BD+C, O+M, WELL AP, CEM, is an architect and consultant with over 36 years of experience in sustainable, resilient building design. He is Director of Sustainability with Intertek Building Science Solutions, serves as Vice-Chair of the LEED Resilience Working Group and volunteers with the AIA Resilience and Adaptation Advisory Group.

“WE ARE DRIVING RAPIDLY TOWARD A BRAVE NEW WORLD OF CLIMATE CHANGE WITH OUR EYES FIXED SQUARELY ON THE REARVIEW MIRROR.” Smart City Miami | 41

RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE

ENERGY TRANSITION, RENEWABLE INTEGRATION, AND GRID STABILITY PRESENTATION BY PAMELA HAMBLIN AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Want to build a power plant in the U.S.? Here are three things to know: First, connecting a big source of power to the grid means getting in line. Second, the interconnection queue is a crowded place. Third, dropouts are the norm. So, while Congress debates permitting reform, what technologies could help us get more energy on the wires, and what does this mean for the energy transition?

D

id anyone else notice that 2023 had an extremely hot summer?

It turns out we hit record heat indexes! This heat reminded me of a discussion I had with James Chiles, the author of a book called Inviting Disaster. The book explores various historical incidents and accidents related to technological failures. It delves into the lessons that can be learned from these events, examining the role of human error, design flaws, and organizational factors. He suggests there are often warning signs or systemic issues that, if left unaddressed, can lead to catastrophic outcomes.

I believe we are there with the energy transition. We are shifting from traditional, fossil fuel-centralized energy sources to a cleaner and more sustainable and distributed energy alternative.

This transition is driven by concerns about climate change, environmental sustainability, and the finite nature of fossil fuel resources.

This transition is placing a large demand on our national grid, which is over 100 years old in many cases and not designed for bidirectional energy transfer. Therefore, our energy grid is becoming increasingly unstable as we phase out our centralized generating resources and integrate our renewable generating resources.

Additionally, the integration of renewable energy into the power grid poses challenges

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due to the variability and unpredictability of sources like solar and wind. Grid stability solutions include advanced grid management systems, energy storage, smart grids, and demand response programs.

This transition and integration place utility companies in a precarious situation.

Utility companies play a central role in the energy transition, as they are responsible for generating, transmitting, and distributing electricity to consumers. The viability of utilities is closely linked to their ability to adapt to changing energy landscapes.

Utilities face challenges such as the need to invest in renewable energy infrastructure, grid modernization, and incorporating new technologies while ensuring financial stability and maintaining affordable energy prices for consumers.

The success of energy transition and grid stability often depends on the seamless

integration of various elements. Smart grids, for example, enable better management of energy flows, incorporating real-time data to balance supply and demand. Energy storage technologies, such as batteries, contribute to grid stability by storing excess energy when supply exceeds demand and releasing it when demand is high.

Policy and regulatory frameworks also play crucial roles in supporting the transition, encouraging investment in clean energy and ensuring a fair and competitive market.

Challenges in this space include the need for significant investments in infrastructure, overcoming technical and regulatory barriers, and managing the transition in a socially equitable manner. However, there are also opportunities for innovation, job creation, and economic growth associated with developing and deploying new technologies.

“ADDRESSING THE INTERTWINED ISSUES OF ENERGY TRANSITION, GRID STABILITY, AND UTILITY VIABILITY REQUIRES A COMPREHENSIVE AND INTEGRATED APPROACH INVOLVING TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION, POLICY SUPPORT, AND COLLABORATION ACROSS SECTORS AND BORDERS. ”

The energy transition is a global phenomenon, and different regions may face unique challenges based on their energy mix, infrastructure, and policy environment.

International collaboration and knowledgesharing are critical for addressing common challenges and accelerating the transition to a more sustainable energy future.

In summary, addressing the intertwined issues of energy transition, grid stability, and utility viability requires a comprehensive and integrated approach involving technology innovation, policy support, and collaboration across sectors and borders. The functioning of energy markets is influenced by regulatory frameworks, technological advancements, environmental policies, and geopolitical factors.

These markets play a vital role in shaping the energy landscape and driving the transition to more sustainable and resilient energy systems.

Pamela Hamblin at Smart City Expo Miami

Pamela Hamblin Business Development Manager, Select Power Systems Deerfield Beach, Florida With over 25 years in management, business development, and operations in the energy sector, Pamela Hamblin has a vast knowledge of the dynamics involved in delivering safe, reliable, resilient, and affordable power. Having worked with centralized legacy and distributed renewable generation, she has a “big picture” understanding of the challenges facing the integration toward carbon neutralization. Her expertise spans energy generation, transmission, distribution, and energy markets. She has trusted relationships with many corporate-level power executives and has been published in numerous industry publications.

Smart City Miami | 43

RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE

STORMWATER: FROM GLOBAL CONTAMINATION SOURCE TO ‘AT-SOURCE’ TREATMENT PRESENTATION BY CRAIG ARI ROTHLEITNER AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

City storm drains are getting carelessly filled with debris and threatening our oceans. In the face of existential threats from toxic waterways, we must clean up our waterways and urban environments and create water-sensitive urban design and sustainable drainage systems.

W

e cannot “science” our way out of global water contamination issues; we need to physically remove

the waste!

In 2023, we know the ocean is the major producer of oxygen on Earth (between 55% and 85%), and it is dying, with over 30% of the ocean not producing oxygen or food.

Only 50% of the ocean is producing krill, the second step in the marine food chain. The ocean normally acts as a 26% carbon sink, but now, with 30% of the ocean dead, it is adding to the effects of climate change.

Three main man-made contamination sources are driving the toxification, acidification, and deoxygenation of our urban receiving environments and ocean: • Stormwater: Every drain ever installed is open to everything wind, rain, gravity, and humans carry to them since installation up to 200 years ago, coming up to 1 trillion drains.

• Agricultural Runoff: All runoff is untreated, which we cannot continue.

We are globally losing our topsoil for agriculture, and chemical loads are doing damage.

• Wastewater: Over 80% of the water discharged into urban waterways and the ocean is untreated, and a large percentage of that is primary treatment only.

• Plastic: Plastic in the ocean only started to have an impact in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is having a negative effect that is only now starting to be

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understood. BUT this is not the major cause of toxification, acidification, and deoxygenation of the ocean—it is just easier to market to the public.

The combination of all three of these global contamination sources is now a real and present danger to humanity’s existence on Earth, through the simple explanation that when the ocean dies, so do we!

While the international filtration industry concentrates on micro, ultra, and membrane filtration, ARI Water Solutions has bridged the deep, dark gap in filtration capability that exists between traditional and screen filtration.

ARI Water Solutions ARI Water Solutions has developed and proven scientifically to the highest standards a capable, robust, economically viable, and scalable filtration technology capable of addressing these issues at a global scale.

ARI has proven ARI Material and the application to the highest levels with CSIRO, ChemCentre (NATA), and Curtin University (top 1% global university), having carried out all data. Our joint-industry Ph.D.-winning project won the coveted Chancellor’s Award for Science and Engineering.

First Issue We Must Fix If we are going to win this fight to save the ocean, there must be a line drawn in the sand now that states, “We must move away from technologies that make claims they cannot substantiate.” If regulators and testing facilities cannot prove the claims these shiny brochures and product manufacturers make, they must be either forced to prove their

claims or be removed from the market. One glaring example of this is claims made by Gross Pollutant Traps (GPT) manufacturers.

This is now an insurance risk for not only municipalities but also for the general community who live around these highly contaminated water environments.

We are now seeing councils in Australia removing Gross Pollutant Traps, as they are creating more negative outcomes than positive, and it is very clear they do not work as described, which can be easily proven by the fact that receiving environments are degrading more every year.

This mentality is to prevent billions of dollars from being invested globally in technologies that make it look like we are fixing the issue but are actually making the outcomes worse.

Stormwater and the Scary Connection to Human Brain Diseases Stormwater is driving the toxification, acidification, and deoxygenation of our urban water environments and ocean.

Our urban water environments are now so toxic and deoxygenated that the unprecedented phosphorus and nitrogen loads delivered from stormwater (rotting vegetation) are now feeding cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms. Cyanobacteria is now being scientifically linked as triggers for dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and MND in humans. Studies have also found cyanobacterial particulates alive in the air 10 miles from the contaminated water body.

The major source of waste entering drains is vegetative waste. Then, you add construction

Swan River in Perth, Australia Perth's favorite playground, the Swan River is a stunning waterway that winds its way from the Darling Scarp to Fremantle. This natural attraction is a popular location for locals and visitors to enjoy a day out boating, fishing, skiing, paddling, swimming, picnicking, or simply enjoying its vista.

waste and lawn clippings. Councils now blow plastics, road base, hydrocarbons, heavy metals, land development waste, and a long list of other contaminants onto the road that are responsible for the demise of our receiving water environments. A major surprise is that in Australia, over 90% of vehicle, mechanical, and production facilities’ wash bays are directly connected to stormwater infrastructure, meaning all the waste and chemicals are also entering our precious environment. We can compare population increase with the gradual contamination of our receiving waters and ocean.

Man-Made Stormwater Treatment Using Water-Sensitive Urban Design In 1992, Mouritz invented water-sensitive urban design (WSUD), which is a “land planning and engineering design approach that integrates the urban water cycle, including stormwater, groundwater, and wastewater management and water supply, into urban design to minimize environmental degradation and improve aesthetic and recreational appeal.”

Millions have been invested in WSUD,

swales, living streams, and wetlands, all brought online to act as a primary filter for stormwater. We see these devices fail generally within the first 12 months as they are not capable of being primary treatment devices. These devices will work exceptionally well as secondary treatment devices!

Global, Scalable, Economically Viable At-Source Solution to Address Stormwater Contamination ARI Water Solutions has developed and proven to the highest field and scientific standards our stormwater filtration device (SFD), which is a drop-in lift-out device that captures approximately 95% of the physical waste while filtering the water to 63μm (one-eighth the size of a grain of sand).

Let’s Not Forget Rainfall is Earth’s only natural water replenishment mechanism. And in the urban environment, not only do we waste the water, but it is transformed by the unprotected infrastructure into contaminated wastewater that is now threatening humanity’s existence.

“ THE COMBINATION OF ALL THREE OF THESE GLOBAL CONTAMINATION SOURCES IS NOW A REAL AND PRESENT DANGER TO HUMANITY’S EXISTENCE ON EARTH...

WHEN THE OCEAN DIES, SO DO WE!”

Craig Ari Rothleitner Founder & Director, ARI Water Solutions Perth, Australia Craig Ari Rothleitner is a qualified motor mechanic and heavy rigger who worked for over 10 years in the dredging industry working on 20,000 HP dredges.

As someone who likes to “fix” broken things, he has invented, developed, and proven a solution for the global issue of stormwater contamination with “at-source” treatment. Rothleitner has also invested years into understanding the highly complex negative outcomes directly and indirectly associated with the fact that every drain ever installed is open to the elements. Then, looking into agricultural and wastewater discharges, shipping’s negative impact, and more, Rothleitner has a fair understanding of man-made runoff and its highly negative effects on our urban waterways and the ocean.

Smart City Miami | 45

RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE

DIGITAL UMBRELLA FOR THE CITY: KYIV.DIGITAL PRESENTATION BY ANATOLII VOVNIUK AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

The Kyiv.Digital app has transformed how citizens experience and interact with their city during such troubling times. The platform has provided citizens with a range of services, from early awareness notifications of air raids to e-democracy initiatives, showcasing the importance of safety, convenience, and empowerment to urban life.

S

peaking of an umbrella in rainy or sunny weather, you could say Kyiv.

Digital is a digital “umbrella” for the city’s residents. This application is designed to provide services and information that are essential in everyday life.

Some 20-30 years ago, umbrellas were inconvenient and heavy, but now they have become compact and automated. Similarly, Kyiv.Digital has become the most significant tool for Kyiv residents and visitors. The application offers numerous useful services and convenient features to ease urban life.

As of August 2023, over 2.5 million out of 3.1 million Kyiv residents use the application, and the daily number of unique users exceeds 1 million.

Do you know of any smart city application used by 80% of the city’s population?

How Kyiv.Digital Was Created The year 2020 was unfolding, and in Ukraine, as in the world at large, the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading rapidly.

Every city was adapting to the new realities of isolation and survival. The capital of Ukraine was no exception. In August 2020, Kyiv.

Digital emerged as the city’s response to the pandemic challenges. It effectively became a digital representation of the city from the perspective of the city’s relationship with its residents, providing essential information while minimizing physical contact.

The next service to be introduced was payment for public transportation. The capital’s public transport system carries approximately 1.3 million passengers daily, and the introduction of this functionality led to an increase in the safety of drivers and public transport controllers. Additionally,

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it resolved the issue of tracking preferential categories of the population and compensating transport companies.

In 2021, as planned, elements of electronic democracy were integrated into the application, allowing citizens to initiate and vote on projects in the city’s budget, submit petitions, and participate in surveys.

Simultaneously, parking and fine payment services were developed, which improved order on the city’s roads. Thanks to a network of weather stations and IoT sensors, information on air quality and radiation levels in the city became available.

A Significant Turning Point: War On February 24, 2022, everything changed.

The enemy was on the outskirts of Kyiv, and the safety of the citizens became the top priority. On February 26, Kyiv.Digital introduced the function of informing about air raids, and shortly thereafter, it added maps with the nearest shelters. By collaborating with businesses that were still operational, the app provided information on where to get first aid, provisions, car repair, and more.

The Kyiv.Digital team works around the clock to ensure the application’s functionality, enabling residents to access

the information they need.

In Kyiv, a curfew is imposed, and as a result, identification cards and passes are introduced within the application to simplify identification and ease movement within the city.

Thanks to the bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Kyiv held its ground.

The enemy withdrew, but the war did not end.

In the fall of 2022, the enemy actively shelled Kyiv, sometimes launching up to 80 rockets per day, aiming to destroy critical infrastructure, especially energy facilities.

Buildings and entire districts in Kyiv and across Ukraine plunged into darkness periodically, sometimes for several days. Communication was disrupted, and there was a lack of water and heating. Throughout the country, socalled “resilience points” were established, places where people could find warmth, charge their phones, have a hot meal, and contact their loved ones. In response to this dreadful situation, offline maps were added to the application so that users could find bomb shelters, heating points, pharmacies, or hospitals despite the lack of internet access.

In 2023, despite the ongoing war, the application continued to evolve. Features like payment for city trains, a virtual transport card, expanded survey functionality, and improved

“ TO HEAR THE OPINIONS OF YOUR CITY’S RESIDENTS ON VARIOUS ISSUES AND CONVEY YOUR PERSPECTIVE TO EVERYONE? ISN’T THIS WHAT EVERY MAYOR OR COMMUNITY LEADER DREAMS OF?”

Kyiv, Ukraine

© ADOBE SOCK

parking features were added. The digital umbrella became increasingly intelligent, assisting and protecting its users from all sides.

The user base continued to grow, and ensuring the stability of the application’s services became a top priority for the team.

To enhance performance, some of Kyiv.

Digital’s services were migrated to the Microsoft Azure cloud. A big thank you to the Microsoft team for their assistance during these challenging times.

Kyiv.Digital from a Professional Perspective Kyiv.Digital is not only an application. It is a comprehensive solution that integrates key municipal information systems into the city’s ecosystem, with the main directions being: • Public Safety: Alarm notifications, shelter maps, air quality, address-based push notifications.

• e-Democracy: Petitions, surveys, public budget, veteran’s cabinet, appointments to centers for administrative services.

• Transportation: Fare payment (QR, payment cards, special transport cards, and others), public transportation schedules, parking services, and more.

• Housing: Organization of online meetings and voting for multi-apartment building owners, payment of utility services, and meter reading submission.

• City Government Tools: Specialized tools and dashboards for mayors and city authorities, showing the current situation in transportation, environmental

conditions, and problem-solving status, allowing for reacting promptly to a crisis situation through address-based push notifications or initiating new surveys.

And, of course, it’s not just software and servers; it’s also a team of like-minded individuals dedicated to making their city better, safer, and more comfortable.

The achievements of the Kyiv.

Digital team have been recognized by the international community, with the solution receiving numerous awards and acknowledgments. But for them, the most valuable reward is the users’ trust.

According to surveys, over 98% of users are satisfied with the application, and despite the ongoing war, they value the e-Democracy (35%) and Smart Mobility (25%) tools the most.

What’s Next? A “Digital Umbrella” for Every City in Ukraine and the World Just imagine that you have a similar solution in your city or region. Residents and visitors feel safe not only because they receive reliable notifications in case of a crisis but also because they are confident that the city authorities consider their opinions, care about the safety of the environment, and provide timely and accurate information. The city organizes public transportation for maximum passenger comfort. Finding and paying for parking spots without the need to search for parking meters, as well as city transport not requiring specialized equipment for fare payment, make urban life more convenient and efficient.

Anatolii Vovniuk Deputy CIO, City of Kiev Kyiv, Ukraine Anatolii Vovniuk is an experienced Chief Information Officer/Chief Digital Transformation Officer with over 20 years of expertise in digital transformation, business processes improvement, and strategy development. He previously worked at Alfa Bank of Ukraine, BNP Paribas, IBM, Piraeus Bank, Ukrtelecom, and Naftogaz of Ukraine.

Tourist routes and events, the ability to invite residents of a neighboring city to an exhibition or charity event?

To hear the opinions of your city’s residents on various issues and convey your perspective to everyone? Isn’t this what every mayor or community leader dreams of?

Smart City Miami | 47

CLIMATE ACTION

CLIMATE, HEALTH & CIRCUITRY: THE TRIAD OF URBAN RESILIENCE

PRESENTATION BY BONNIE SCHNEIDER AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

What are the roles of weather data and climate change in the design and operation of smart cities? What is “weather wellness,” and how can urban environments be shaped to promote public health and overall well-being? This article sheds light on health challenges occurring in the face of climate change and offers insights into how we can all work together to build a more sustainable future.

L

et’s begin with the immediate challenges urban areas face due to climate change. I have spoken to many people who say that they live in places where they didn’t think climate change would affect them, and now, suddenly, it is.

Here in Miami, some people say we are the bellwether for the country where people are experiencing climate change.

For instance, this past summer in Miami, we experienced 46 consecutive days with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. If you are a longtime Miami resident and feel like it’s getting hotter here, you’re right. And it is one of the biggest threats to urban resilience. Elevated temperatures are creating more intense weather events, causing a serious risk to infrastructure. (The latest stats have us potentially at $1 trillion in damages by 2040.) Recognizing the magnitude of this challenge is crucial as we delve deeper into the health implications and the role of technology in addressing these challenges.

Health in City Heat My book takes a deep dive into how climate change affects mental and physical health, particularly for Gen Z. Some physical health effects intensified in cities are heat stroke, respiratory conditions, and the spread of vector-borne diseases. For example, we’re seeing Lyme disease in areas where people didn’t think they had to worry about it. Air quality is also a significant concern. Pollution combined with rising temperatures leads to ground-level ozone, which can be very serious, especially for the elderly and young children.

Unfortunately, in cities, we also have

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the urban heat island effect, where cities are hotter than the suburbs—it can be a 20-degree difference just by 10 miles or less.

That lack of greenery and an abundance of materials like asphalt and concrete that don’t absorb water all make a difference. We also have the design of our cities compounding the heat issue, as buildings block wind flow and impede natural cooling.

There are also mental health repercussions. We’re seeing highly populated areas getting extreme weather events more often. They’re coming earlier and later in the season, they’re more intense, and they’re happening over and over again. If you live in California, where you’re hit by wildfire after wildfire, there is a mental health stress impact—it could even go as far as PTSD. We see that with hurricanes, too. I did research on Hurricane Katrina, and even two decades later, people are still suffering from PTSD. Another issue with climate change is displacement, when people are forced out of their homes. These climate migrants are becoming more abundant across the world.

That can lead to serious problems, especially for children. We saw that with Hurricane Maria, leading to feelings of depression and a

lack of belonging.

There’s also eco-anxiety, a fairly new term, which is very prominent among Gen Z. In a study of more than 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 in over 10 countries, 75% said that they had anxiety about climate change. If you ask older generations, that number dwindles. But for younger people, it’s a serious issue affecting their thoughts.

The Role of Technology in Shaping Resilient Cities The challenges we face are multifaceted, but with challenges come opportunities.

Technology is key in shaping resilient cities.

One of the biggest things people are talking about is AI. In terms of health care, many more people will be able to get diagnosed through AI and machine learning. The latest statistics predict savings of $150 billion annually for the U.S. and health care by 2026. Hopefully, that will be the case.

We also have smart grids, which can reduce urban energy consumption up to 30% or greater, and the Internet of Things, which allows us to monitor environmental conditions in real time. I’ve been doing TV weather for two decades, and that switch of getting real-time data for temperature, humidity, sky cover, and

“IN A STUDY OF MORE THAN 10,000 PEOPLE BETWEEN THE AGES OF 16 AND 25 IN OVER 10 COUNTRIES, 75% SAID THAT THEY HAD ANXIETY ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE.”

more makes a huge difference in forecasting.

As we harness these technological solutions, it’s clear that the path forward isn’t just about mitigating the effects of climate change; it’s about envisioning and creating urban environments that are sustainable, resilient, and conducive to the well-being of their inhabitants.

Future-Ready Cities: Climate, Health, and Circuity Holistic planning, where we integrate technology, health, and the environment, is important. It is the cornerstone of creating cities prepared for challenges like climate change by incorporating technology and health into every facet of urban Bonnie Schneider at Smart City Expo Miami

development. For example, a lot is coming down the pipeline in terms of companies needing to report their carbon emissions.

Data-driven governance is at the heart of future-ready cities, and it signifies a shift toward using data as a primary tool for decision-making in order to gain insights. It will also help community and city managers make proactive decisions.

And finally, global collaboration is imperative for the success of future-ready cities. Urban challenges are not confined by geographical boundaries. Cities worldwide face similar issues, despite where they’re located. Global collaboration allows us to develop innovative solutions, best practices, and experiences.

Bonnie Schneider Founder, Weather and Wellness Boca Raton, Florida Bonnie Schneider is a sustainability and climate contributor for Techstrong.tv, a media platform featuring thought leaders in technology and digital transformation.

She is the author of the book Taking the Heat: How Climate Change Is Affecting Your Mind, Body & Spirit, and What You Can Do About It. She is also founder of Weather and Wellness, successfully launching its original video content focusing on climate change and health. Nationally recognized as an on-camera television meteorologist, Schneider has shared her insight and expertise on everything from hurricanes to snowstorms for MSNBC, CNN, HLN, Bloomberg TV, and The Weather Channel.

Smart City Miami | 49

CLIMATE ACTION

EMBRACING YOUR ROLE IN BUILDING A CLIMATEREADY FUTURE PRESENTATION BY CAROLINE LEWIS AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

The CLEO Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, non-partisan organization exclusively dedicated to climate crisis education and advocacy. Founded in 2010, it works with communities across Florida to build climate literacy and mobilize climate action for a just, resilient future.

I

was born and raised in Port of Spain, Trinidad. And if you told me when I was a barefoot street urchin eating mangoes, guavas, and tamarind off the trees for breakfast, lunch, and dinner that I would be up here speaking about smart cities, I wouldn’t believe you. I was supposed to be a doctor, but I resisted my parents and became a teacher. That decision allowed me to continue to be inspired by others and hone my skills in inspiring learners of all ages.

I share my education story because I think each of us is an educator and because the best definition of education I ever heard came from William Butler Yates. He was an Irish poet who said, “Education is not the filling of a pail; it is the lighting of a fire.” I agree, and I want to be an arsonist. I want all of us to be arsonists…to light fires in the hearts and minds of others.

I reflect with pride on my journey as a teacher, a school principal, and now, a founder and senior advisor of the CLEO Institute, building climate leadership through innovative education and engagement strategies. Our goal is to wake up every sleeping giant who can influence change, building support for bold climate action. Our goal is to convince everyone of their own power to influence change.

I hope to remind everyone working on smart cities that a smart city is a climate-ready city. And that’s what the CLEO Institute is all about championing.

We want everybody to make climate a

50 | Smart City Miami

front-and-center part of how they approach their jobs, lives, and roles in society. Some of you just started your journey in imagining smart cities; some of you are seasoned warriors; and, I suspect, many of you are somewhere in between. Regardless, everyone has something to contribute to planning for future cities.

I have been doing this climate work nonstop since 2010; it stuns me when some people say they are not worried because they live inland or on high ground and will not be affected. And we say be prepared because we’re all coming. We’re all going to move to safer places less threatened by the impacts of this climate crisis. We also point out that climate vulnerability extends beyond rising seas and coastal inundation and includes heat, health, food, and freshwater vulnerability; vast weather extremes; increasing threats of wildfires; and displacement of communities from or to your area.

Remember that we are not just designing smart cities in frighteningly vulnerable places like Miami and Fort Lauderdale but also for current and future places where all the climate refugees (which many of us will become) need to move to. So, as you design smart cities, we urge you to keep in mind that a climate justice lens helps you better plan for the entire population, minimizing risks by intentionally planning for those who lack access to resources.

Think about hydration stations, cooling

centers, solar farms, community gardens, affordable housing, tree canopies, etc.

When we work with frontline communities, we must adhere to procedural justice, which says, “Do nothing for us, without us.”

People want to be at the table to co-create the solutions with you. For our community outreach work, CLEO literally takes the table to communities, meeting people where they are and respecting their lived experiences. I assure you that this will serve you well in building smart cities. You will get actionable information and insights straight from the people, which we need more of.

Today, I urge you to see your journey as a smart city planner or contributor as

“I URGE YOU TO SEE YOUR JOURNEY AS A SMART CITY PLANNER OR CONTRIBUTOR AS ONE THAT ’S ACCEP TING OF THE CLIMATE SCIENCE THAT ’S SO URGENT AND THE CLIMATE JUSTICE ISSUES THAT ARE SO REAL.”

Caroline Lewis Founder & Senior Advisor, The CLEO Institute Miami, Florida Caroline Lewis wants the world to wake up to the climate crisis. Like the Irish author William Butler Yeats, Lewis believes that education is less about “filling pails” and more about lighting fires in people.

Lewis founded the CLEO Institute in 2010 to educate, engage, and mobilize the masses in support of climate action. Recognizing the urgency of the climate data and the disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities, she designed CLEO’s programs to build climate literacy and informed advocacy, top-down and bottom-up, simultaneously. Ultimately, the goal is to spur economic and political engines to grasp the seriousness of the issue and to act with urgency.

Caroline Lewis at Smart City Expo Miami

one that’s accepting of the climate science that’s so urgent and the climate justice issues that are so real. And if you aren’t scared out of your mind, you’re not paying attention to the data. They say crisis creates opportunity, and here is yours: Design thriving cities that address the wildly varying individual and collective needs of diverse populations.

Lastly, on behalf of the CLEO Institute, I ask you to rate yourself on two scales: your climate knowledge and climate engagement. The scales are from 1 to 10. 1: I know/do nothing; 10: I know/do everything.

What’s your climate knowledge score? Your climate engagement score? We want you to see these scales as journeys and work to intentionally move up the scale with respect to how much you know and do.

The next step is to take those two scales of knowledge and engagement and turn them into circles that help us prioritize what’s important. We all have circles of concern and circles of influence. If your circles of concern do not include the climate crisis, it should. Once you embrace learning more, your need to influence change expands.

With respect to the climate crisis, in 2010, I was studying and meeting with climate scientists, and my circle of concern became so huge that I had to do something about it. I was in climate grief. I still am. And every morning, I wake up and ask: Should I stay in bed and rock myself back to sleep? Or should I get up and fight another day, giving people hope that smart cities are being planned and we will be okay? I choose to believe in you.

So, when my circle of concern about climate became too big for my head and heart to handle, I grew my circle of influence. I founded the CLEO Institute, whose work is broad and deep, addressing climate literacy, climate justice, and climate action and growing a youth movement.

I encourage you to visit our website, CLEOInstitute.org, and join the CLEO community.

In closing, I ask each of you to work on your circles of concern, study the science, and know what good people are doing and what ideas are out there. Then, I want you to take that concern and understanding of what needs to be done and do it. Grow your circle of influence. I know you can. I believe you must. You have more power than you realize.

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CLIMATE ACTION

CLIMATE TECH FIRESIDE CHAT AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI: MATT HAGGMAN & LAURA GAVIRIA HALABY

In the past decade, Miami has evolved into a vibrant tech hub. During this Fireside Chat at Smart City Expo Miami, Matt Haggman talks with Laura Gaviria Halaby about positioning Miami as a global climate tech leader, capitalizing on its unique challenges. The city’s strategic shift aligns policy, activism, and entrepreneurship, fostering a promising future at the forefront of sustainable innovation.

Laura Gaviria Halaby: How has Miami evolved in the last 10 years?

Matt Haggman: In 2012, I worked at the Knight Foundation, where we had the opportunity to think about what’s next in Miami. Thinking about trends globally and what we were seeing here, we hit upon the idea of building a tech and startup community.

When I arrived at Knight, I had been a reporter at the Miami Herald. I was asked to talk to people for four months and say, “Tell us what’s next for Miami.” It was an interesting opportunity and felt like it was the moment to lean into tech and build an ecosystem here.

Miami had gone through this renaissance, thinking about building the art and cultural life of the city, about how we’ve seen the revitalization of neighborhoods like Downtown and Brickell, from Little Haiti to Wynwood, and Miami being so uniquely international, so culturally alive. And it felt like an environment where we could build a successful startup and tech community. Meanwhile, globally, the thought was that while the primary centers of innovation wouldn’t go away, new places would begin to emerge, and Miami could be one of those places. Now, 10 years later, it’s still early days in Miami, but think about how far we’ve come and how Miami is on the map as a center of tech and innovation in its own right.

LGH: Amazingly, you went all over the world to see how technical systems are built. Some mistakes I see cities making is they try to copy what’s out there, stakeholder for stakeholder, rather than thinking about what makes their city unique and how they can be different.

You were very conscious of what made Miami unique. Can you share more about that?

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MH: Miami is highly entrepreneurial. And it ranks among the leaders in the country as being so uniquely international. This is not a place where you need to teach entrepreneurship; it’s in the DNA. But now we’re at a point to spin forward and think about what’s in the next 10 or 20 years. Miami is trying to lean into where we should be going next. And while 10 years ago, we leaned into tech and building, making Miami one of those emerging centers of innovation and company creation in the world, as we think about the next 10 years, we’re leaning in on climate tech. And, of course, resilience and sustainability are critical, but how we’re talking about it at Opportunity Miami, housed at the Beacon Council, an economic development organization that’s focused on job creation, is that we are on a journey that the entire global economy is transitioning to net zero. The journey is necessary, but it also presents the business opportunity of our lifetime.

LGH: And what are those fields of opportunity that you see in climate tech that are emerging in the city?

MH: The amazing thing is that it’s the whole economy that has to shift how we get around, how we produce food, how we cool and heat the dwellings we work and live in, how we manufacture things, where we get our power. All of that has to transition.

Right now, we’re already seeing how we get around transitioning as it relates to automobiles, the shift to EVs. And the bet is that we will ultimately see that in every corner of our economy.

Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist with a firm called Andreessen Horowitz,

famously more than 10 years ago wrote an op-ed called “Software Is Eating the World.”

He said ultimately, every business will be impacted by technology, whether the taxi driver waiting for a cab fare knows it or not, technology will disrupt that person’s job.

And, of course, rideshare came along.

The thinking now is that as we look ahead, you could write that same piece, except you have to say climate is eating the world.

Every company will ultimately be affected by climate. The companies that lean into it will be the ones that will be rewarded and do much better. They are not only doing the right thing, but ultimately, they will be financially rewarded as well.

LGH: We’ve had this conversation for many years, but we never felt it so specifically.

Now, we are really feeling the effects of how climate is impacting how we live. Everybody should have a climate strategy. Going back to what you did 10 years ago in terms of looking around the world and seeing the tech ecosystems, how they were being built, is there a particular city or country around the world that is doing a very good job on how they’re tackling climate tech?

MH: Right now, cities across Europe are in the lead. In so many ways, you can think about the transition to net zero and building a sustainable future as sort of a stool on three legs. It’s built on civic activism, which is so important. It’s built on really good policy, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The U.S. has been behind, but that’s beginning to change. As we think about the combination of policy, civic activism, and entrepreneurship, Europe has been the leader.

Matt Haggman Vice President, Opportunity Miami, The Beacon Council

Matt Haggmann and Laura Gaviria Halaby at Smart City Expo Miami

Miami, Florida

That said, we recently had a gathering with folks from VC firms who said not one place has defined itself as the center of climate tech innovation but that Miami could be that place because it is associated with the challenges of climate change, notably sea level rise and extreme heat. As a community, we can turn a vulnerability into a great strength.

This has been the thrust of Opportunity Miami, which we launched 18 months ago. The feeling is that Miami will be a global climate solutions hub where the next generation of net-zero sustainable companies are built. And it’s important to note that this isn’t just purely aspirational. It’s happening right now. As we think about this world that’s coming, the transition to electric vehicles, one of the largest EV charging network companies in the U.S. is on Miami Beach.

As we think about food production, Miami (Homestead) has the largest indoor aquaculture facility in the world, Atlantic Sapphire, led by a Norwegian entrepreneur who thinks we can get to net zero in producing salmon.

We also have Lennar, the biggest home builder in the country, which has a venture arm called Lennox that’s investing in companies that are coming up with things like clean concrete to build next-generation homes.

LGH: I love what you said that Miami could be at the center of that example to the world, but how do you reconcile the mixture between needing to make some changes as a city in terms of mobility and construction with economic development? How should a city look at that?

MH: Where we’re going right now with sustainability, economic growth, and

development is beginning to align with some parts of the economy. Electric vehicle manufacturers are doing better financially than the incumbents. And now all the incumbents are racing to do EVs. Other parts of the economy are going to take a little longer.

And in some areas, markets alone will not solve this. And that’s where we need policy to help.

LGH: Definitely, Miami has the location to be at the center of this climate conversation.

The fact that we are surrounded by water and that we are experiencing extreme weather conditions, there’s a will of the local governments to do something about it.

What are we missing, or what are the things that we need to evolve? Do we have an education perspective? Are students focused on it? Do we have enough entrepreneurs who believe this is a topic where they should invest their time? What are we missing to make it the right ecosystem?

MH: I think all of the different elements are there to varying degrees in terms of political will, of there being strong civic activism, of companies leaning into it. But I think that the big thing, just like back in the early days when we were focused on building a tech ecosystem, generally here in Miami, we need a few really big home runs. We need a few of those companies that are being built right now that knock it out of the park, get everyone’s attention, and make it abundantly clear that this is a future that is both going to be sustainable and also one that’s creating jobs and propelling our economy. And with a few of those here, we can cement the notion that Miami is the place that is building that and is the hub for climate tech around the world.

Matt Haggman is Vice President, Opportunity Miami, at the Miami-Dade Beacon Council. In this role, he leads a community-wide initiative focused on imagining the Miami of 2040 and helping the community build it. Opportunity Miami is focused on driving innovation and entrepreneurship, increasing talent development and inclusion in one of North America’s most diverse regions, and catalyzing an effort to turn a city threatened by sea level rise into a leader in the transition to a sustainable, net-zero economy.

Laura Gaviria Halaby CSO, Faktory AI Miami, Florida Laura Gaviria Halaby is a scale-up and business development expert with an entrepreneurial background and ample experience in leadership roles in venture capital and tech.

In addition to being the Chief Sales Officer for Faktory AI, she is also a member of the Fintech / Crypto Action Board for the City of Miami, an investor and active mentor for early and growth stage startups, and serves on the board of Banco Sol in Bolivia.

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QUALITY OF LIFE

APPLYING SCIENCE, COLLABORATION, AND EXPERIMENTATION TO IMPROVE QUALITY OF LIFE KEYNOTE BY RAIMUNDO RODULFO AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

The Coral Gables Innovation and Technology department (CGIT) has taken a 360-degree collaborative approach to smart city technology services and continuous improvement programs to refine and execute our strategic plans, help others, conduct impactful research, augment skills, add capacity, and remain competitive and innovative as an organization and a team.

J

oining the City of Coral Gables in 2004 after a decade working as an engineer in the telecommunications industry, I bring an entrepreneurial mindset to my role as CIO and Director of IT. This mindset, shaped during the industry’s technological evolution, involves incorporating intelligent connected infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI), and experimental approaches into public sector innovation.

My team’s focus on Quality 4.0 and Industry 4.0 aligns with the city’s commitment to high standards of municipal services and quality of life. Implementing Lean Six Sigma principles, we strive for customer-centric total quality, emphasizing strategic planning, continuous improvement, and innovation across various city departments. Working collaboratively, our team integrates seamlessly, breaking down silos to create a holistic approach to innovation.

This approach to civic innovation is a continuous synergetic cycle that starts with sharing and communicating. This continuum has established a diverse portfolio of collaborative programs and centers of excellence with leading organizations across sectors (science, academia, government, industry, business, and nonprofit/professional) and verticals (energy, transportation, telecommunications, utilities, education, and health care). Our team works on those programs in alignment with internal operations, infrastructure, service delivery, and project management frameworks to help us connect the dots for collaborative innovation, 54 | Smart City Miami

develop competitive strengths, and make a difference for the entire community.

The city’s founder, George Merrick, laid the groundwork for innovation a century ago, establishing a planned community focused on quality of life, education, research, and economic growth. Embracing this legacy, our smart city vision incorporates Quality 4.0 and Industry 4.0 technologies and best practices, reflecting a commitment to continuous improvement and total quality management. Our Smart City Engineering Framework is the foundation for building resilient network infrastructure and digital services for our community. We’ve built an intelligent connected infrastructure featuring communication networks, smart city labs, and R&D testbeds and remain committed to education and research, as evident in our internship programs, which have engaged over 100 interns and resulted in hiring several team members.

Our strategic management framework for smart city collaboration focuses on sharing experiences and fostering partnerships. Collaborations with local universities, research institutions, and industry leaders create a virtuous cycle (Share→Learn→Partner→Collaborate →Build Collective Value→Repeat), leading to actionable projects that benefit the community. This collaborative approach extends to standards and best practices organizations, such as IEEE, IISE, ASQ, and NIST, ensuring our initiatives adhere to established guidelines.

Drawing on my telecommunications background, I led my team to prioritize high-speed communications to ensure critical services like 911 and first-responder operations remain functional during emergencies. This infrastructure enhances our ability to withstand hurricanes and facilitates the development of a comprehensive smart city ecosystem that attracts talent, businesses, and investment.

To achieve this, we’ve cultivated a diverse team with expertise ranging from fiber-optic installation to full-stack development and data science. Our internal collaboration with city leadership and all municipal functions, coupled with partnerships with academia and industry, positions us in varying capacities (sometimes as a research laboratory, a general contractor, or an internal SME consulting firm), serving all city departments, capable of designing, engineering, building, and operating complex infrastructure. At the same time, when we focus on resiliency and business continuity—keeping the lights on—we also transform the business and organization through continuous improvement and innovation, keeping the wheels moving and the team sharp.

Some of CGIT’s recent case studies that exemplify our exponential organization mindset and actionable synergetic cycle with impactful results include STEM research collaboration projects in diverse fields such as AI and machine learning, IoT, highperformance computing, data science, blockchain and Web3, business technology, cyberinfrastructure, cybersecurity,

Raimundo Rodulfo at Smart City Expo Miami

Raimundo Rodulfo CIO / Director of Innovation & Technology, City of Coral Gables Coral Gables, Florida Raimundo Rodulfo, P.E., MSEM, PMP, started his career in the early ’90s as an electrical engineer in the telecommunications industry. He joined the City of Coral Gables in 2004 and currently serves as Director of Innovation & Technology and Chief Innovation Officer. He leads strategic planning, oversight, and management of citywide IT operations, infrastructure, and smart city initiatives.

Under his leadership, the city has received numerous awards, including IEEE Smart Cities Jury Award in 2022, first place in the U.S. Open Cities Index in 2019 and 2020, and Smart 50 Award in Urban Infrastructure in 2020 and 2023.

electrical and electronics engineering, computer science, quality engineering and process improvement, digital literacy and inclusion, human-centric design, policy and governance, intelligent traffic management automation and optimization, electrification and decarbonization, AR, spatial computing, and more.

Our collaboration with Ekin Smart City led to the installation of the first modular AI-powered smart city pole in North America.

The project showcased the integration of aesthetic design—recently enhanced by our partnership with the Italian industrial design firm Pininfarina—with cutting-edge technology developed by aerospace engineers, reflecting our commitment to enhancing the city’s visual appeal and technological capabilities while reducing the footprint of technology furniture in the right of way. Additionally, ongoing partnerships with NIST, PNNL, and ARPA-E have resulted in case studies and projects focused on digital twin technology, intelligent

transportation, and energy optimization.

Our Smart City Hub and Digital Twin public platforms, featuring open data, urban analytics dashboards, and citizen engagement tools, invite collaboration from researchers and academia. A project like AutonomIA, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA-E), allows our city to work in partnership with PNNL, UC Berkeley, and industry innovators utilizing advanced technologies like digital twins, high-performance computing, machine learning, and AI for traffic optimization and emissions reduction. A research project like the Coral Gables Resilient Energy System (RES) prototyped smart microgrid distributed energy resources for Coral Gables public safety facilities in collaboration with the UM SimLab and Bloomberg Philanthropies. AIDA, our AI Digital Assistant developed in collaboration with MIT, WVU, City Innovate, and UC Berkeley through a STIR Labs program funded

by NSF, enhances the user experience on our

Smart City Hub platform. Stemming from a need to simplify information access, AIDA is an example of user-friendly innovation.

Coral Gables is a dynamic smart city ecosystem that leverages strategic partnerships, research collaborations, and an entrepreneurial mindset to address complex challenges and improve the quality of life.

Our commitment to innovation, continuous improvement, education, and collaboration has garnered recognition and numerous awards, solidifying our position at the forefront of civic innovation. Moving forward, our CGIT team will continue applying science, collaboration, and experimentation to improve the quality of life for our community and address its most pressing needs and priorities with co-creative solutions.

Visit our smart city digital library (coralgables.com/itdocs) and innovation and technology bulletin (coralgables.com/ techstories) for more in-depth insights into our ongoing projects and collaborations.

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QUALITY OF LIFE

NURTURING NATURE EXPLORERS: EMBRACING NATURE IN PLAYGROUND DESIGN

KEYNOTE BY EBRU OZER AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Today’s urban playgrounds often feature standardized structures that, while meeting safety requirements, stifle imagination and limit the potential for exploration. In contrast, a burgeoning movement in playground design seeks to reintroduce nature back into children’s play spaces, offering numerous benefits for both physical and mental development.

Evolution of Nature-Based Play The roots of nature-based playgrounds can be traced back to the “Junk Playgrounds” of post-World War II Europe. Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen pioneered this movement in the 1930s, introducing playgrounds that utilized discarded materials, fostering creativity and self-expression in play. The evolution continued with Adventure Playgrounds, exemplified by the pioneering Notting Hill Adventure Playground in 1960s London. These spaces encouraged free play, incorporating naturalistic elements that allowed for risk-taking and exploration.

In the U.S., the concept took root in the late ’70s with the creation of the Huntington Beach Adventure Playground in Berkeley, California.

Since then, nature-based playgrounds have continued to evolve, emphasizing the importance of a direct connection to the natural environment in children’s play.

Miami-Dade’s Nature-Based Playground Initiative Our design firm, LandscapeDE, has been a close collaborator of the nature-based playground initiative of Miami-Dade County.

By closely working with the county’s Parks, Recreation, and Open Spaces Department since 2015, we have successfully completed three nature-based playgrounds and are currently in the process of designing four more.

Our hybrid approach to the nature-based 56 | Smart City Miami

play concept blends natural play elements with traditional playground equipment and generously incorporates South Florida’s native plant palette to provide immediate shade and reduce heat exposure. Our design efforts have not only transformed the play spaces we directly designed within Miami-Dade County but also have significantly influenced the county’s NatureBased Playgrounds Design Criteria Booklet, a guiding template for future nature-based playground projects in the county.

What Defines a Nature-Based Playground?

Nature-based playgrounds are not just a collection of playground equipment; they are immersive environments that seamlessly blend with the natural and designed landscapes. They offer opportunities for free, imaginative play by incorporating natural elements and carefully selected traditional play equipment. The benefits of such playgrounds extend beyond entertainment.

Children engaging with nature through play develop environmental awareness and a deeper connection to the natural world. These experiences foster diverse play, building confidence and improving collaboration, problem-solving, and empathy skills. The interactive nature of these spaces encourages children to modify and customize their play experiences, promoting a sense of ownership and creativity.

Integrating Nature into Play LandscapeDE’s approach to nature-based playground design begins with drawing inspiration from local natural spaces, such as South Florida’s live oak hammocks or pine rocklands. By thoughtfully integrating recovered sinker cypress logs, native limestone boulders, and earth forms into our designs, we create playgrounds that mimic natural landscapes and include naturalistic landforms such as hills, valleys, and water features.

The freedom of movement within play spaces allows for spontaneous games, encouraging activities beyond structured play. Pathway connections become part of the play, offering alternative routes through existing or created stands of trees.

The generous use of native plants and careful consideration of plant communities contribute not only to the aesthetics of our playground projects but also to the creation of essential habitats for local wildlife and additional connections between play and nature.

LandscapeDE’s commitment to naturebased play extends beyond the lines on the paper. Through careful plant material selection processes, we prioritize durability, avoid toxic plants, and promote plant diversity. Maintenance is also a crucial aspect, requiring effective communication

Camp Matecumbe Park, Miami, Florida

with maintenance personnel to ensure the longevity of the natural elements.

The selection of play equipment is also pivotal in successful design. We often favor natural and simple materials over flashy designs. We also include customdesigned play equipment in each of our projects. By incorporating these strategies, LandscapeDE has not only succeeded in nature-based playground designs but also found that these principles enhance the design of other playground types.

Smart and Sustainable Future The impact of nature-based playgrounds extends far beyond the immediate joy of play. It nurtures a connection to nature that is vital for the well-being of children and the sustainability of our communities. As Timothy Beatley notes, visible connections between cities and nature are essential for individuals to understand their personal connections to the natural world.

As landscape architects, architects, and planners, we bear the responsibility of making these connections visible in our designs. Through the evolution of nature-based playgrounds, we witness a harmonious blend of creativity, environmental consciousness, and the joy of play—a vision that promises a more sustainable, resilient, and smart future for generations to come.

Ebru Ozer at Smart City Expo Miami

Ebru Ozer Principal, LandscapeDE & Professor, FIU Miami, Florida

“CHILDREN ENGAGING WITH NATURE THROUGH PLAY DEVELOP ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS AND A DEEPER CONNECTION TO THE NATURAL WORLD.”

Ebru Ozer is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental and Urban Design and Director of Strategic Planning and Initiatives in the College of Communication, Architecture and the Arts at FIU. She is also a co-founding principal of the design firm LandscapeDE and serves as the elected VP of Education and as a member of the Board of Trustees at the American Society of Landscape Architects. Ozer holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from Louisiana State University and is also a Ph.D. ABD in civil engineering.

Smart City Miami | 57

QUALITY OF LIFE

WHERE DO YOU SEE THE BEAUTY? PRESENTATION BY MARTINA FRATTURA AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Is our mind able to restore just in the presence of natural elements? Considering the personal idea of beauty as equally restorative as being outdoors, by tracking the physiological response, the same effects were expected via light stimuli.

I

n 2017, I decided to start A Beautiful Light, a research project to understand how light can contribute to beauty in architecture. I wanted my research to be both scientifically sound and practical.

Light has a strong influence on how we perceive space because it gives hierarchy to objects and surfaces. It lets you select what visual information is the most available.

Imagine being in a dark room at night.

After your eyes adapt, you might recognize the perimeter of the space. Then, you can keep adding lights one by one to build a scene out of the darkness. And on the other end, you can make the space so bright that all information is lost again. But it’s not just about light. It’s about light and shadow.

They cannot exist without each other.

Another thing is how important light is for our bodies. It tells our brain when to be active and when to rest and sleep. Our hormone levels change depending on the levels of light around us.

How Light Makes You Feel Say you enter a room, and it’s lit from the ceiling with a cold, neon light. But if you turn it off and turn on smaller, warmer lamps in the corners of the room, people feel cozier and more relaxed. There are three main factors at play here: color, temperature, and direction. Let’s start with direction.

Whether light comes from above or below eye level is important. Evolutionarily speaking, in history, light coming from above was usually the sun and sky. The sky’s vast surface triggers even more receptors than the sun itself. And this activation is related to the most active moments of our day.

58 | Smart City Miami

On the other hand, for hundreds of thousands of years, light coming from below the eye level was usually from fire. Human activity around the fire was always related to socializing, feasting, and rest. This has also helped set the standard our brains use for color temperature. Burning wood creates much warmer light than daylight.

However, our perception of light can differ depending on our region. For example, people living near the equator might find cool light refreshing because in those places, heat is omnipresent, and warm colors, as well as warm light, can increase your perception of heat. So they seek cold colors and light in the evening, making them feel cooler. On the other hand, in Nordic countries, particularly Sweden, where I lived, you can notice they light their spaces with as many small and warm light sources as possible to mimic fire and its heat. It’s almost like a placebo effect.

There’s also a big difference between color temperature and light spectrum.

You can have a bulb with a certain color temperature, but the underlying color spectrum could be different from what you see. A warm light bulb can actually emit a lot of blue light spectrum, which is stimulating. But as I mentioned earlier, light reveals objects in space. And we are part of the space. So, if a lot of light comes from above, we might feel overexposed. That’s why darkness can facilitate feelings of intimacy. And not just between two or more people but also in terms of introspection.

Can Light Influence Our Health?

Our cortisol and melatonin levels are influenced by the spectrum, direction, and

light exposure time. Light helps us calibrate our internal clocks. It tells us when to be active and when to rest. And through good design, we can compensate for the lack of light, at least partially.

In Dublin, for example, a lot of the traditional architecture is built out of lightcolored stone that reflects light. Even that helps us get more of it. On the other hand, in modern times, we often get the wrong information from our light environment.

By now, people are aware that the blue light from their phones, computers, and TVs signals to the brain that it’s time to be active. So, companies have started to implement blue light filters for these devices. And there’s a link between our hormones, circadian cycles, and immune system. The impact of light on our health is enormous.

Do Cities Need More Light?

In general, people think that the more light in our cities at night, the better. Architects and entrepreneurs are using light to grab people’s attention: “Look at this building; look at my hotel; look at my shop!” But they don’t consider that there is just no need to have such an amount of light. It takes just one over-lit place to drag the rest of the street to compete for attention. We need to be mindful of light pollution.

Even when a street light only shines on the pavement, the light reflects back to our eyes and the sky if it’s too bright. So, we need to be mindful of using the proper brightness. And this light doesn’t only affect humans; it affects animals and insects, too.

It disrupts their circadian rhythms and can harm the ecosystem.

Martina Frattura Head, The Beauty Movement Martina Frattura at Smart City Expo Miami

Cities are over-lit because of supposed safety. But over-lighting will not improve safety. Instead, safety depends mainly on whether people feel good in a place, decide to spend time there and create a human presence on the street.

In addition, if we only have vertical lighting, like these street lamps, it can worsen our vision in that environment. We need to be able to perceive the depth of space, and for that, we need light coming from different directions. It’s also essential to be able to perceive colors accurately—to see changes in people’s faces, for example.

For that, we need lights with a high Color Rendering Index (CRI), not necessarily stronger lights. And even warm light can have a high CRI. It’s also an issue when street lights shine into people’s windows. The light disrupts sleep and forces them to use blackout curtains or blinds. Safety is important, especially to women, but adding more light where there’s already enough won’t help. We need lighting depth, light that’s not blinding, and one that adds beauty to a space and makes it more attractive and pleasant for people.

Being Fascinated Softly When I had the privilege to go to Eindhoven University in the Netherlands, I worked with psychologists. One of them was working on the topic of “soft fascination,” and she introduced me to it.

She first asked me, “What’s the most beautiful thing you can do in your hometown?” And I answered, “To watch the sunrise,” because we are on the eastern shore. “And how long does it take?” she

Lisbon, Portugal

asked. “Well, a few hours.” And then she asked, “Well, do you feel tired after that?” I said, “No, the opposite!” She said, “Exactly!”

I thought, well, I’m getting more light, so I’m getting more alert. But she explained that although that’s true, it’s not only that; it’s also about this “soft fascination,” a state of mind where even though we are focused and present in the moment, we are not getting tired but restored. It’s a bit as if we were sleeping but without sleeping. I found that incredibly beautiful.

And I started thinking about this. There is this thing, a way to be focused and attentive but be restored at the same time. And we get it primarily from spending time in nature.

But how could we bring it to spaces where we spend most of our time—the indoors?

And could it be done through lighting?

Gradually, I have concluded that soft fascination is linked to beauty. It happens in places and situations we find beautiful: nature, lakes, mountains, or the sunrise.

So, I decided to check if that link was genuine. I decided, among other things, to perform an attention test to measure the level of restoration. Between the measurements, the participants watched a scene or an object they picked as beautiful.

At that time, I was biased by my experience because I thought beauty was truly subjective. I was already starting to get skeptical about it, and later on, I learned that very often, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder.

Because of this, I went to 10 different countries with different climates and cultures to get a broader spectrum of what

Martina Frattura, class 2020 of the 40 Under 40 Lighting Awards, works as a lighting designer and independent researcher. She graduated in interior design at the Politecnico di Milano and at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Architectural Lighting Design and Health. She directed “A Beautiful Light” itinerant research, which has taken her to 10 different countries and investigates the use of artificial lighting to sustain a good level of attention. Frattura is now head of the think tank “The Beauty Movement,” made of designers, scientists, artists, architects, and philosophers who seek the fundamental principles of aesthetics and its impact on the various disciplines.

people could perceive as beautiful. In one way, that was the best decision I ever made.

It opened up a new research interest for me: aesthetics and neuroaesthetics— understanding beauty on a fundamental, primal level. And I learned that the perception of beauty is not that subjective.

It’s very much a thing that all humans have in common. And striving for beauty is one of the healthiest things humans do. That, for me, was mind-blowing.

I performed my study with about 200 people and also recorded an EEG and the galvanic skin response. The results have shown that there indeed is a link between beauty, soft fascination, and maintaining an attentive state. From then on, I based my work on these findings and designing lighting that helps us enter a state of soft fascination.

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THE UNDERLINE PRESENTATION BY JAKE MOSKOWITZ AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

The Underline is a 10-mile linear park, multimodal trail, and outdoor art destination being built underneath Miami’s Metrorail that will span from the Miami River in Brickell to Dadeland South.

This is a bold vision we’ve been working on for over a decade. It started when founder Meg Daley realized the enormous opportunity to repurpose and revitalize the land beneath the Metrorail and give it back to the community. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.

Big Projects Can Solve Big Problems The Underline’s mission is to deliver and activate a world-class 120-acre park that will transform regional mobility and celebrate diversity, culture, and lifelong learning.

Through innovative urban trails and creative programming, we are connecting people to their environment and each other to create a safe, healthy, equitable, and sustainable community.

When the Metrorail was built, it divided our neighborhoods. The Underline is attempting to right that wrong by stitching these neighborhoods back together. The fully funded $140 million project comes from a variety of sources, including a federal BUILD grant and state and local municipal funding. It’s broken up into three phases: The first phase, the Brickell Backyard, is already open. The second phase is currently under construction, and we just broke ground on the third phase.

Countywide Impact What is the impact of this investment? For one, we’re already surprised by the number of people coming to The Underline. We average almost 5,000 daily visitors in the first half-mile alone. We’ve had over 200 community programs in the last year, and we aspire to be one of the country’s largest and longest free outdoor art destinations. We’ve also incubated 18 small businesses using The Underline as a storefront. We’re estimating a $9 billion economic impact, quite the return on investment from the initial $140 million.

• Phase 1: Brickell Backyard: In our first phase, we brought back 30,000 native plants and trees. We use a zero-escaping approach (no fertilizer or irrigation) that 60 | Smart City Miami

soaks up water like a sponge. It rarely floods, thanks to the topography. The urban gym is gated, so we can host community events. It’s also a transit connector at the intersection of the Metrorail, Metromover, trolley, metro bus, and, now, a multimodal corridor.

• Phase 2: Hammock Trail: Phase 2 is scheduled to open at the end of 2023.

It is 2.25 miles long from Coral Way to Southwest 19th Avenue in North Coconut Grove. This will extend the project so we can start cycling from Coconut Grove to Downtown Miami safely. It will accommodate farmers markets and incorporate a natureinspired playground. It also connects to Simpson Park, one of the only preserved hardwood hammocks in the country.

• Phase 3: This is the final 7.5 miles from North Coconut Grove to Dadeland South, Jake Moskowitz at Smart City Expo Miami

which is planned to be opened in two phases in 2025 and 2026. Our plans were informed by a series of public meetings.

We asked people what recreational amenities and destinations they wanted to see on The Underline. What was the most popular request? Pickleball! Near Korea Street, we are incorporating four pickleball courts, mini soccer, and a fullsized basketball court. The second-most popular? A skate park. We’re creating a 10,000-square-foot agility course to facilitate all wheel types, whether you want to practice your tricks on your skateboard, inline skates, or BMX bike.

Safety The top three priorities for The Underline are safe multimodal transportation, nature, and community. Let’s talk about safety first. We’re implementing considerable infrastructure and intersection improvements to help people

Jake Moskowitz CIO, Friends of the Underline Miami, Florida The Underline Phase 3 - Pineland Courts

cross the streets safely. We’re widening the crosswalks at all of the intersections. We’re also bringing awareness with bright, nuanced paint and ample places for waiting set behind the crossing areas. We’re also working on no right-hand turns on reds and leading interval times. This will give pedestrians and cyclists more time to cross before the vehicles.

We’re also focused on extending our commitment to this ecological corridor with dedicated bike and pedestrian paths. We have a two-way, 10-foot-wide bike path and a meandering dedicated pedestrian path.

Sprinkled throughout are our amenity areas, which will be the destinations where people will congregate.

Innovative Planting Solutions We’re focused on canopy and re-naturalization strategies. Our reforestation approach is adopting the Milwaukee Method, where we’re bringing the first microforests into South Florida. These forests grow 30 times denser and 10 times faster than traditional urban forests. They also increase biodiversity, absorb water like a sponge, and reduce heat.

We’re also innovating with green infrastructure. Bioretention basins are being implemented throughout the park to remediate stormwater and make the surrounding communities more resilient.

We’re adding 1,800 new trees and palms and 350,000 new plants in Phase 3 alone.

This will get us to 500,000 new native plants throughout the 10 miles and 120 acres.

Our rain gardens will be a great way to restore our habitats and lessen the impact of runoff in storms and also be a place for students to connect to nature and learn

© THE UNDERLINE / JCFO

about the native habitats. We also have stormwater ponds, an example of blue-green infrastructure. When the land is dry, the plant beds showcase the beautiful natural habitats we’re restoring. When it rains, they come to life. It also incorporates an elevated path.

Community The Underline isn’t just a park; it’s not just a multimodal trail; it’s also a community destination. We have 12 amenity areas planned for Phase 3. The first one is the Grove Gallery, a new marketplace by the Coconut Grove Metrorail Station that celebrates local crafts. When we asked the community what they wanted in this area, they said they wanted food from local purveyors. It’ll also help facilitate a gaming area and some great locations for new artwork.

The Douglas Metrorail Station, the geographical center of The Underline, will incorporate an urban beach (to reduce heat in the park), a micromobility plaza where people can charge their scooters and e-bikes, and an area for rotating art installations. There’s also infrastructure for food trucks and a container.

Near 37th Avenue, we have our Bark Park, an agility course for our four-legged friends.

It has two parks, one for small dogs and one for big dogs. Over half of our visitors currently walk their dogs in Phase 1, so we know the importance of infrastructure for dogs.

Close to the Coral Gables Fire Station, we will have our Fitness Room, inspired by the flex court in Phase 1. It will incorporate a halfsized basketball court and an event area.

We partner with Baptist Health to provide free community health and wellness events to the public. We also intend to work with

Jake Moskowitz is Chief Innovation Officer at The Underline, a 10-mile linear park, multimodal trail, and art destination in Miami. He leads all technological development focused on user experience and optimizing operations for this innovative public space project. He designs and develops pioneering technology to enhance The Underline’s visitor experiences, civic engagement, and operational efficiency. He also oversees the planning, design, and implementation of The Underline’s Tech Master Plan, creating a smart and connected urban environment for the community.

the fire station to offer CPR classes, fitness programs, etc.

We are also creating a Water Balcony by the Gables Waterway. Currently, the area is so overgrown that people don’t realize there’s water access here. We are building a bridge that will support infrastructure for a kayak drop so the community can more easily access the river.

At Stanford Drive by the University of Miami’s main campus, we have the New Rock Ridge Plaza, which will include two plazas adjacent to the campus, an outdoor classroom, a vestibule area, two amphitheaters, and a pathway through the microforest. We see this as a unique space for programming and for people to gather.

As we get closer to South Miami City Hall, we reach the Play Forest, a nature-inspired play area with outdoor musical instruments, exploration trail log tunnels, and an increased tree canopy. This will be a great place for the community to come together and enjoy a delightful shaded experience.

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A HOUSE FOR EVERYONE: ARCHITECT AS FACILITATOR

PRESENTATION BY ELISA SILVA AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

With few resources, creativity, and the committed engagement of neighbors and outside entities, an abandoned building in Caracas, Venezuela, was transformed into a shared space and a long-term, financially independent association offering courses and events in dance, music, gastronomy, art, reading, theater, and more, creating opportunities for encounters that favor the city’s integration across socioeconomic and geographic borders.

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’d like to share a story about an initiative that I believe could serve as a model for practices supporting architecture that repairs inequalities in cities.

Cities have complex dynamics. Many have been built by immigrants who came there to work and helped produce wealth but did not find a place for themselves or their families. We have corollaries in Miami (and almost every city in the U.S.) in the disinvested neighborhoods that offer affordable places for migrant communities to live. As capital investment seeks new mines to mint, we should be wary of the good intentions that support financial accrual at the expense of people who have lived there for generations.

Shouldn’t a public amenity be for the people living there, making sure they can stay rather than banking on the returns from future neighbors? I invite architects to resist simple solutions and be more curious, open, and, above all, respectful of pre-existences.

Listen to neighbors, locals, animals, plants, and an array of actors and stakeholders. I’d like my work in Caracas to act as a way for us to reflect on the role of architects, planners, geographers, and city supporters.

My project started in La Palomera in Caracas in 2016 and shifted in 2018 with Integration Process Caracas, a program funded by the U.S. Embassy. It began with a manifesto of the city, where we pledged to rid ourselves of the notion that the barrio was somehow a disease that needed to be cured. We invited people from the entire city to get to know the barrio, to dance, walk, and, essentially, enjoy culture and art.

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Together, we grew into a large multidisciplinary team of artists, activists, landscape architects, educators, and dancers and were welcomed to the Cross of May celebration, a tradition the barrio has observed for decades. We built a scale model of the barrio and its surroundings, which was carried in a procession by neighbors and followed by a concert with people from the entire city. It allowed us to have conversations with neighborhoods about how this place was founded and formed over time. This gesture of integration started to manifest itself.

These experiences taught me to see public spaces all over the place in La Palomera.

This was the message I took with me to the Architecture Biennial in Venice in 2021: The walkways, stairs, gardens, and more work as public spaces.

That work led to many opportunities, including the House of Everyone. Neighbors showed us an abandoned site and asked what we could do there. We decided to host a party and invited everyone we had met. It was a huge success. From the beginning, it was clear this would be a permanent, inclusive, and complex space for art and culture in the community but offered to the entire city.

We transformed this space, co-imagined and co-designed it, and took advantage of existing knowledge in the community (for example, how to produce a bamboo roof that collects water that we use in the restrooms).

The kitchen, gardens, and activities began to define how the spaces would be used spontaneously and organically. The courtyard and garden occupy the center of this house,

which is tended to by William Diaz, a neighbor who encourages people to learn more about plants and vegetable gardens.

The spaces are used for music classes, storytelling, gardens, culinary courses, performances, a market, and a library. There’s enough space for all sorts of gatherings and events. And this has been so successful that we’re spilling into the next-door house, which also belongs to the municipality. Our calendar of events has over 40 different entities that have become a part of this initiative. I would argue that this has become one of the liveliest places in Caracas, something other communities are keen to emulate and where everyone wants to go and stay.

Most importantly, this is a place of strength, where people in the barrio show the rest of the city how to encourage and practice inclusion and model a socially just and democratic expression of urban livelihood. To illustrate that synergy, we exhibited three communities as prospective theaters reminiscent of Paladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. These are theaters that project activities that are not only specific

“I HAVE LEARNED TO SEE ARCHITECTS AS FACILITATORS OF DYNAMICS AND ENERGIES THAT EXCEED MY OWN CAPACITY. ”

Casa de Todos, La Palomera, Caracas, Venezuela

© ENLACE FOUNDATION

to the neighborhood but are also shared with other barrios and neighborhoods. It was exhibited at Arc en Reve in 2022 in Bordeaux, France. Before that, it was at the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2021.

The experiences of the House of Everyone have changed the way I practice architecture.

I have learned to see architects as facilitators of dynamics and energies that exceed my own capacity. Libraries are a good example of where different encounters happen regularly.

These are places where we embrace diversity instead of fearing it and can think of the city together and curate an environment that is plural, inclusive, and necessarily complex.

So, how do we strengthen these kinds of spaces that are not monetized but open and democratic? How do we create new ones?

Architects could contribute in valuable ways by placing their efforts and resources toward orchestrating such experiences. On the architect’s role, Bernard Tschumi posited in his 1976 work Common Grounds that architecture is not about the conditions of design but the design of conditions. Said another way: architect as facilitator. What exactly needs to be facilitated? I believe the profession needs to support gestures of spatial justice. It is a call to be the “good architect,” a notion Philibert de l’Orme brought up in a 16th-century treatise on architecture. The good architect encourages open structures integrated with

lush gardens. They have four hands and three eyes, increasing their agility and a keener vision better equipped to register and reproduce complexity. It is not focusing on form or objects but on livelihood and harmony.

Architects don’t appear to be taking de l’Orme’s mandate to heart. Our libraries, public spaces, markets, public transportation, and parks, places where encounters take place, are not thriving or growing but instead constantly under assault, underfunded, and vulnerable to development pressures.

As a discipline, we are perhaps closer to the engraving of the “bad architect,” who is missing eyes and hands, roaming in a barren landscape surrounded by gates and fortified buildings. Sounds familiar to our landscapes and cities today.

The rapid escalation of capital investment in land is a serious threat to our shared livelihood. Local politicians are eager to encourage these investments while forsaking spaces and experiences that support better livelihoods and, hence, creating a lack of trust.

Data and AI are ever-expanding. Virtual dimensions need to be kept in check. We need to walk neighborhoods, talk to people, learn from physical exchanges, and champion our commons where encounters take place. We must encourage a more complex process of engagement, take clues from pre-existences, and strengthen culturally and historically layered urban dynamics.

Elisa Silva Director, Enlace Foundation Caracas, Venezuela Elisa Silva is the director and founder of Enlace Arquitectura (est. 2007), a multidisciplinary professional practice in architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture, and Enlace Foundation (est. 2017), an NGO that promotes environmental, cultural, and educational programs of social inclusion and participatory design collaborations. Enlace’s work has been recognized in numerous design competitions, exhibitions and international biennials, including the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize 2022, the Biennale di Venezia 2021, the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2021, and more.

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BIKE TO SCHOOL AND POP-UP BIKE LANES:

BETTER CITIES AND LESS TRAFFIC, STARTING WITH KIDS FIRST PRESENTATION BY KURT KAMINER & HANK SANCHEZ-RESNIK AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

If you make bicycling safe for kids, you can make it safe for everyone.

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ometimes, smart solutions are simple solutions. Take the bicycle, for instance. In the grand scheme of today’s impressive mobility technology, the bicycle has barely changed since 1885. It still holds the potential to offset urban emissions, improve health, reduce traffic congestion, and bring joy to cities, particularly youth. Despite these benefits, the shift toward bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, and micromobility remains comparatively small in the U.S. A persistent, flawed perception is that the bicycle is fraught with danger. However, most dangers of biking are not inherent; they are imposed. We are still suffering the effects of midcentury transportation engineering, which envisioned a world where the automobile replaced virtually all modes, with no inclusion of bicycles or micromobility.

Solutions have since come forth in the form of protected bike lanes and intersections— North America’s adaptation of bicycle lanes in the Dutch paradigm. These lanes are parallel to the road but physically separated from automobile traffic. Their effectiveness cannot be understated: A landmark 13-year study of 12 U.S. cities revealed that the cities that built protected bike lanes saw a significant reduction in injuries and deaths, 50% and 44% on average, respectively. This makes protected bike lanes the single most effective intervention for increasing cycling safety.

Plus, properly designed bike lanes look safer, thus encouraging more people to consider riding, overcoming some of the negative perceptions of cycling safety. The study also noted that some of the most successful cities saw increases in bicycle ridership concurrent

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with the decrease in injuries.

The significance of protected bike lanes has been of great interest to the University of Miami WalkSafe and BikeSafe programs, as we have focused on youth pedestrian and bicycle injury prevention for over two decades. Founded by Dr. Gillian Hotz after noting a spike in youth trauma center visits in 2001, the programs—under the umbrella of the KiDZ Neuroscience Center at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis—have led various research projects, community engagement events, and educational programs within Miami-Dade County Public Schools and local municipalities.

While WalkSafe and BikeSafe are primarily educational, one thing that has become clear is that no amount of education, behavior change, or defensive cycling skills can compensate for streets that mix cars and bicycles in a way that is dangerous by design.

Even though road engineering standards are slowly working toward better guidelines, a shift in physical transportation infrastructure cannot be done overnight and is particularly difficult in car-centric cities where the concept of riding a bicycle is frequently met with objections.

An emerging approach to overcome these issues is low-cost “pop-ups,” the reimagination of a city’s streets in the form of a protected bike lane, slow street, pedestrianized boulevard, or similar street-calming approaches. These demonstrations are held temporarily, enough for the community to experience what a permanent implementation might be like and for advocates and the city to collect data about use and community sentiment.

While pop-ups may not be the most

elegant or formal implementation, these demonstrations provide a realworld experience of how a permanent implementation would function and feel.

They also provide a counterpoint to the fears over automotive traffic congestion, and their temporary nature allows for adjustments to be made based on live observations.

While protected bike lane pop-ups have had success in other cities—some built by nonprofits, others by bicycle organizations, some by cities—a grassroots pop-up protected bike lane had never been attempted in Miami, to our knowledge—until now.

Coconut Grove is one of the few neighborhoods still walkable and, to an extent, bikeable. It is also home to Hank SanchezResnik, founder of Bike Coconut Grove and advocate for the local community. “There are a couple of major streets that go through the heart of the village,” Hank notes. “It’s a very autonomous neighborhood. But there’s tons of traffic coming north and south through Coconut Grove—not necessarily to it—and more traffic going to and from the schools.”

While this cut-through traffic remains an issue, many of the Grove’s neighborhood streets have the makings of a Dutch fietsstraat (a shared street where bicycles have priority and cars are “guests”). These tree-lined streets are narrow enough to keep most drivers at a respectful speed, making them the perfect connector to protected bicycle lanes.

And there’s a bike bus. Three years ago, Hank brought to our attention the efforts of the parents of Coconut Grove Elementary, who formed a daily bike ride from their homes to the school. While their route benefits from

Kurt Kaminer Social Marketing Manager, BikeSafe UHealth MPD / Bike Coconut Grove / BikeSafe Protected Bike Lane

Matilda Street Painting, Coconut Grove Elementary School

the calm neighborhood streets, the street in front of the school is a one-way street with no bicycle facilities, resulting in, as Hank puts it, “about 300 cars being driven by parents during drop-off, going the other way against families riding to school.”

With Hank’s help, the PTA, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, and the Miami Police Department, we created a pop-up by shifting the existing parking zone one lane over. For Walk, Bike, and Roll to School Day, the entire street—630 feet—received a bidirectional popup bike lane.

A survey conducted after the event found 77% of parents in favor of a permanent installation. Additionally, according to traffic counts performed by Bike Coconut Grove before and during the demonstration, automobile traffic was reduced by 30% during the pop-up.

Most importantly, the success resulted in many families joining to help roll green paint for a second pop-up months later. This

Coral Gables, Florida © BIKE SAFE/UHEALTH

Miami native Kurt Kaminer rediscovered the bicycle in his early teens and began to rethink city mobility.

Since then, he has put his marketing and communications skills toward safe streets advocacy, melding the discussion of infrastructure with education and community engagement. Kaminer aims to make human-oriented streets a household topic through innovative media, inspiring parents and kids to be a part of civic engagement for better, human-scaled streets.

© BIKE SAFE/UHEALTH

community support is extremely important to build momentum for these projects. Once you’ve rolled green paint to create a bike lane in your neighborhood, there’s a sense of ownership in the project that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. No longer is it the city’s popup; it’s your pop-up, too.

When we look at the prevailing trends in transportation, the narrative often centers around autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles as our future. But even if we replace all our internal combustion vehicles, we’ll still have traffic congestion, and it is unlikely that people, especially families with children, want to ride next to a speeding vehicle without protection, autonomous or not.

Bringing protected bike lanes and safe streets with pop-ups has been a great way to ease our traffic issues with a smart, healthy solution. Many people claim, “You will never get people out of their cars in Miami,” but this pop-up proves otherwise. Indeed, the simplest solution might actually be the best.

Hank Sanchez-Resnik President, Bike Coconut Grove Coconut Grove, Florida A dedicated activist working to improve the environment through a focus on carbon-free mobility, Hank SanchezResnik has led efforts to improve transportation and mobility options, particularly bicycling infrastructure, in Miami and Berkeley. Resnik is the founder of Bike Coconut Grove and a member of the Miami-Dade County Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC). A journalist, editor, and media producer, he also publishes the Coconut Grove Spotlight.

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BUILDING A MORE RESILIENT AND SUSTAINABLE CITY BEAUTIFUL PRESENTATION BY MATTHEW ANDERSON AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Over the last eight years, the City of Coral Gables has become a leader in sustainability and resiliency in Florida and nationwide. The “City Beautiful” recognizes that sustainability must be a key focus of its policies and services to create a more resilient and sustainable city.

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he City of Coral Gables’ sustainability journey began in 2015 with the development of a Sustainability Management Plan.

The 10-year plan set goals for reducing energy and water consumption, fuel usage, and overall greenhouse-gas emissions by 20%. To achieve those goals, the city identified projects and put policies and funding in place to reduce our operational impacts on the environment.

Currently, Coral Gables has one of the largest municipal electric vehicle fleets (71 electric vehicles) in Florida. Its fleet is 12% electric, which puts the city near the top of the list of electric fleets in the nation. We also installed over 30 public and private charging points throughout the city, with plans to double that number over the next few years.

A key requirement for all future buildings over 20,000 square feet is to be built to LEED Silver standards or equivalent so that large developments reduce waste through efficient energy and water use in addition to other resiliency and sustainability measures. Leading by example, the city recently inaugurated a state-of-the-art police and fire headquarters and a trolley depot, both built to LEED Silver standards.

Additionally, to encourage residents to reduce consumption, the city waives permit fees for energy and water efficiency projects such as solar panel installations. The city installed 11 solar-powered charging benches in our parks, allowing residents and visitors to charge their electronics. This is a great public benefit year-round, especially after losing power following a hurricane or tropical storm.

With close to 300 acres of parks, the city continues to purchase additional green space to convert into community parks.

Coral Gables has an extensive tree canopy of more than 41,000 trees and has been recognized as a Tree City USA by the Arbor Day Foundation since 1985.

In 2019, the city partnered with the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce to launch a Green Business Certification Program to educate, recognize, and reward local businesses for their sustainability efforts.

So far, nine local businesses, including the University of Miami (UM), have been certified.

Shortly after, in 2020, the city created the Keep Coral Gables Beautiful (KCGB) program to promote environmental sustainability and educate the community

Coral Gables Solar-Charging Station

“WHILE MUCH PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE...WE ALSO REALIZE THAT CORAL GABLES’ SUSTAINABILITY JOURNEY HAS JUST BEGUN.” © CITY OF CORAL GABLES

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© CITY OF CORAL GABLES

Matthew Anderson Assistant Director Mobility & Sustainability, City of Coral Gables Coral Gables, Florida

Coral Gables Green Fleet EV Charging Station

about taking daily action to reduce litter, improve recycling, and keep the city beautiful. Since then, KCGB has hosted over 120 events with more than 17,000 volunteers who have collected over 600,000 pounds of litter and debris.

The city’s recycling program has an 8% contamination rate, one of the lowest in the state, compared to other municipalities that have a typical rate between 35% and 40%. Additional recycling and sustainable disposal efforts include being the first city in Miami-Dade County to partner with Covanta Dade Renewable Energy to establish a prescription drug disposal program. Since the program began, over 1,700 pounds of prescription drugs have been collected and disposed of. Historically, these would go to landfills or be flushed down the toilet, contaminating our water supply. Because of this program, the discarded drugs are now incinerated and converted into energy.

Providing safe and sustainable alternative transportation options is another important piece of the puzzle.

To encourage bicycle ridership, the city has created more than 10 miles of bike lanes and provides businesses with free bike racks. For more than 20 years, Coral Gables has reduced congestion and emissions by offering a free trolley

service. More than 1 million riders use the service annually to travel within our central business district and access the county’s rapid transit system. To connect the first and last miles of transit, the city has added other alternative modes of transportation, including electric scooters and Freebee on-demand vehicle service. More than 315,000 riders have used Freebee since its introduction in 2018.

The health of Biscayne Bay and the city’s 40 miles of coastline and waterways is also incredibly important. To reduce nutrient runoff into the bay and preserve this valuable ecosystem, Coral Gables has established several water quality initiatives and continues to investigate natural and technological solutions. In addition, the city has partnered with local organizations and universities, including Florida International University (FIU), UM, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Miami Waterkeeper, to establish studies and pilot programs aimed at improving the bay’s health.

The city is also focused on climate resiliency and dealing with the potential impacts of sea-level rise. To help plan, the city developed lidar elevation maps, authored the white paper “Adaptation Strategies: Legal Considerations,” and assessed critical infrastructure’s

Matt Anderson is the Assistant Director of Mobility and Sustainability with the City of Coral Gables. His primary responsibility includes managing the city’s sustainability and resiliency initiatives. This includes overseeing the implementation of the city’s Sustainability Management Plan and working across all city departments and with residents and the business community to develop policies/actions to reduce energy, water, waste, fuel, and greenhouse gas emissions. Anderson also helps lead the city’s water quality and climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.

vulnerability to projected sea-level rise.

In partnership with FIU, a tidal/sediment gauge study is underway. While planning is key, having funding available to adapt to and mitigate future sea-level rise is critical. Since 2017, the city commission has allocated over $13 million to an infrastructure reserve fund with the goal of reaching $100 million by 2040.

While much progress has been made since establishing our Sustainability Management Plan eight years ago, we also realize that Coral Gables’ sustainability journey has just begun. We continue to explore solutions to reduce our impact on the environment. A healthy and sustainable environment is critical to our economic prosperity and growth.

We are committed to continue working toward a more resilient and sustainable City Beautiful for future generations.

More information on the City of Coral Gables’ sustainability initiatives can be found at coralgables.com/sustainability.

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TURNING INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TWINS INTO URBAN SOCIAL METACITIES/CITIVERSES PRESENTATION BY DR. JOSÉ A. ONDIVIELA AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

As advanced digital twin projects provide more predictive, holistic, and real-time alternative simulation capabilities, our cities are turning into metaverse-like virtual worlds. How does this new “phygital” duality lead us to a physical resident vs. avatar presence, and what are the consequences?

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ith the help of technology and artificial intelligence, our cities address two fundamental groups of challenges: the social sphere and the management of the physical environment.

We must put citizens at the forefront of all of our city’s activities and benefits. We must improve our citizens’ well-being and social conditions. This way, new services offered to citizens try to transform administrative tasks into experiences; skills training is prioritized to promote employment and attractiveness to investors; new technologies are used in the rapid development of new applications (low/zero code) to respond quickly to raising changes; and the most advanced data analysis technologies are used to safely analyze citizens’ sensitive data and understand their needs (Confidential Computing).

Metacities Cities like Singapore, Seoul, and Doha are developing metaverse cities to attract virtual talent.

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Regarding the physical environment, cities use technology to manage critical infrastructure (water, energy, traffic, pollution, waste). It is worth highlighting the relevance of urban mobility, which requires advanced technologies given its complexity and constant evolution (new vehicles, autonomous cars, air mobility). One of the most innovative transformative elements is the concept of the 15-minute city, which is about saving citizens time by allowing them quick access to important services, including their work. Cities are also preparing for the consequences of climate change by trying to achieve maximum resilience and carbon neutrality.

This dual commitment between the physical and social is well described in Amsterdam’s green donut initiative, which proposes that a city should protect its citizens against inequality and inequity while

developing environmental protection policies.

To manage the physical environment, cities are incorporating digital twin technology, an innovation developed for industrial systems that adapts well to managing the city’s physical parameters, allowing new systems to be integrated with existing ones, providing new areas of innovation, and, most importantly, being able to run simulations and test alternatives to any problem without wasting time and money on physical tests. Many proposals call themselves “digital twins” but only position data on a GIS environment. But only those that provide a “what if” simulation model or automate some tasks and responses should be considered real digital twins.

When we apply a digital twin model to a city, we find the possibility of incorporating Web3 technologies that have been developed notably for the video game market from a metaverse perspective. The fundamental difference is that a digital twin is an exact replica of the city, while these metaverses develop virtual worlds with full creativity. Cities like Singapore, Seoul, and Doha are developing metaverse cities to attract virtual talent, citizens who will not physically live in those cities. In any case, for all cities, the metaverse represents an opportunity to create a partial virtual world that incorporates the image and identity of the city and serves as a virtual place to offer all types of virtual services to citizens.

But cities must always put citizens as the recipients of all the services and benefits created. Therefore, the question is how to incorporate citizens into this physical

Digital Twin Many companies are offering new cloud services that enable cities to digitize their physical spaces.

© BENTLEY COMMUNITIES

management model of the city (digital twin).

We must understand the IoT data that feeds a physical digital twin is not sensitive, nor does it require high privacy, although it is critical as it may include alerts, so the main requirement is processing speed. However, citizen data is very sensitive and must be protected in compliance with regulations (GDPR, etc.), which is not a question of speed but privacy. Therefore, we must understand our citizens’ behavior, social situation, preferences, and habits. Only in this way can we offer you personalized services that respond to your needs.

In this sense, complex academic simulation models are developed by adding humanoids to the digital model. Make age-friendly cities adapted to one of the toughest problems we face in all of our cities: people aging. All involved human or social data is sensitive information, so we must be careful. This also poses some additional changes like ensuring data quality, security, privacy of this

information, and, importantly, ethics and governance. Perhaps the most appropriate initiatives are those that always incorporate a social purpose into each area of digital transformation. This is the data-driven city model proposed by the city of Tampere, Finland, which recently obtained several awards at international conferences. It is about building a citizen-centered society with the help of data and AI. The fundamental transformation is to evolve a task-based administration into an administration that first considers the needs of citizens and then develops digital models to serve them.

Therefore, it is a matter of including variables that describe the social environment in the simulation and prediction model. In this way, ideal 15-minute city models can be developed, providing vulnerability analysis by neighborhood, segmentation of social needs, predicting the future impact of inflation or other crises, analyzing the status of happiness

and vitality, knowing the degree of skilling and employability, or preventing crime.

Going further in this integration with the digital twin model, we could think about evolving the concept of the Resilience City (physical) into an Adaptive City model, a city that adapts its urban planning (plug and play) and its physical services such as public transportation or security to the ever-changing and demanding citizens’ expectations. The futuristic model would aim to incorporate generative artificial intelligence to understand changes in social proposals, verify that physical conditions are adequate, ensure compliance with regulations, and automatically generate new code that modifies the semi-automatic city management model through the digital twin. New technologies, especially AI, will allow us to implement a process of cooperation and co-creation of city services. Is it a first step toward the neural connection with the “mother” city? (Avatar).

José A. Ondiviela Industry Advisor Cities, Microsoft Western Europe Director WW Observatory for Attractive Cities, UFV, Madrid Madrid, Spain Professor José Antonio Ondiviela is the smart cities solutions director for Microsoft Western Europe. He is also an associate fellow researcher and director for the WorldWide Observatory for Attractive Cities at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid. He is very active in the academic area, with a Ph.D. thesis and book titled Beyond Smart Cities: Creating the Most Attractive City for Talented Citizens. He is a frequent speaker at international events and a UNESCO Smart Cities SME Consultant.

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RESHAPING URBAN HORIZONS:

THE TRIFECTA OF DIGITAL TWINS, EDGE AI & WEB3 IN SMART CITIES DEPLOYMENTS KEYNOTE BY DR. INGRID VASILIU-FELTES AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

The design and deployment of smart cities represent a significant paradigm shift in urban development. Driven by the relentless advance of technology, these cities stand at the intersection of digital twins, edge AI, and Web3. This article underscores recent conference proceedings that were dedicated to the technological trends that underpin these deployments, address the challenges they face, and explore the future directions of this transformative movement.

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mart cities have emerged as a response to profound shifts in global demographics, as Generation X and Generation Alpha redefine the social, economic, and technological landscape. These transformations can act as powerful catalysts for economic growth, disrupting established educational and employment models while ushering in an era of heightened technological investment.

Influential Tech Trends Within the sphere of smart city deployment, several influential technological trends have emerged. These trends, including digital identity, hyper-automation, AI engineering, generative AI, and advanced computing, form the bedrock upon which smart cities are constructed. Furthermore, emerging technologies such as 5G, IoT, biometrics, edge computing, AI, and blockchain play an integral role in shaping the smart city of the future. The convergence of these technologies can generate renewable energy ecosystems, fuel advanced data analytics platforms, and empower robotics innovations and is fundamental to a nascent metaverse and an evolving industrial Omniverse.

As outlined by Accenture, the metaverse is the next iteration of the internet built on AI and emerging 3D visual technologies, like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). NVIDIA has defined the industrial Omniverse as a computing

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platform that enables individuals and teams to develop Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD)-based 3D workflows and applications.

The Smart City Trifecta Digital twins, edge AI, and Web3 can constitute a powerful trifecta for smart city developments. Leveraging the unique capabilities of these technologies can revolutionize smart cities in the following ways: Digital twins have found applications in urban planning, infrastructure management, disaster preparedness, and renewable energy solutions, providing a platform for in-depth simulation and real-time decision-making. As defined by Gartner, virtual twin experiences let you visualize, model, and simulate the entire environment of sophisticated experience.

They differ from digital twin prototypes that focus only on one object and facilitate sustainable business innovation across the full product lifecycle.

IBM defines edge AI as “the deployment of AI algorithms and AI models directly on local edge devices such as sensors or IoT devices, which enables real-time data processing and analysis without constant reliance on cloud infrastructure.” Edge AI has assumed a pivotal role, particularly in the context of real-time video analysis, industrial IoT, and environmental and health monitoring. Recent pandemic experiences have further underscored its relevance.

A World Economic Forum report has outlined Web3 as “empowering users to bypass internet gatekeepers and retain ownership of their data.” The impending transition to this novel architecture, an internet marked by decentralization, aims to create decentralized citizen-driven smart cities governance with enhanced supply chain transparency, optimized energy management, responsible deployment of autonomous vehicles, and the rise of new economies, such as the creator economy

“BY ADDRESSING THESE CHALLENGES AND CHARTING A COURSE FOR FUTURE INNOVATIONS, SMART CITIES ARE POISED TO REVOLUTIONIZE URBAN LIVING AND CREATE SUSTAINABLE, INTELLIGENT, AND INTERCONNECTED CITIES OF TOMORROW.”

or the net-zero economy. However, these advancements also trigger numerous challenges.

Challenges The deployment of deep tech solutions in smart cities requires a proactive approach to overcome several challenges: • Escalated risk profiles demand a reevaluation of risk appetite, tolerance, and management practices, necessitating the development of novel insurance instruments.

• The growing convergence of technologies exposes smart cities to increased cyber threats, mandating stringent cybersecurity measures.

• In the era of digital ethics, integrating smart city frameworks with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks emerge as a formidable challenge.

• The development of international interoperability standards is critical to the success of these technologies.

• Customized key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics tailored to individual technology deployments are indispensable for assessing the impact of smart city initiatives.

Future Directions The evolution of smart city deployments promises several transformative and

disruptive advancements, including: • The commercial application of humancomputer interfaces, which are poised to transition from innovation labs to practical use.

• The potential of satellite internet to bridge digital divides and enhance connectivity in underserved regions.

• The application of spatial and quantum computing to address long-standing challenges.

• The evolution of the metaverse and the emergence of industrial omniverse solutions in various sectors offer novel avenues for development and interaction.

Conclusion Successful deep-tech smart city deployments demand a multifaceted approach. This complex approach includes creating a culture of cyber-ethics resilience and deploying proactive robust cyber-ethics programs, as well as digital risk management by design.

It also requires the establishment of new customized interoperability standards for smart cities and the formulation of customized smart cities KPIs aligned with the United Nations’ 2030 and 2050 indicators.

By addressing these challenges and charting a course for future innovations, smart cities are poised to revolutionize urban living and create sustainable, intelligent, and interconnected cities of tomorrow.

Ingrid Vasiliu-Feltes Founder & CEO, Institute for Science, Entrepreneurship & Investments Miami, Florida Dr. Ingrid Vasiliu-Feltes is a health care executive, futurist, and globalist who is highly dedicated to digital and ethics advocacy. She is a Forbes Business Council member, a digital strategist, a passionate educator and entrepreneurship ecosystem builder, an expert speaker, a board advisor, and a consultant. Vasiliu-Feltes is CEO of Softhread Inc.; founder and CEO of the Science, Entrepreneurship and Investments Institute; and founder and CEO of Revexpo Consulting and is currently serving as a country director for WBAF USA, senator of WBAF, faculty member of the WBAF Business School-Division of Entrepreneurship, and teaching the Executive MBA Business Technology course at the UM Business School.

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ENHANCING SMART CITIES WITH USER-FRIENDLY AI PANEL DISCUSSION AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI: SARA RUSHINEK, AVI RUSHINEK & DENISE MENDEZ

AI-powered generative tools have the potential to revolutionize the way smart cities are designed and operated. These tools can help to create more sustainable, secure, and efficient cities and custom-made products and parts in offline host environments. As these tools continue to develop, we can expect to see even more innovative and widespread applications in the years to come.

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mart cities aim to improve residents’ quality of life by leveraging data and technology. At the recent Smart City Expo Miami, a panel discussed innovations that could transform urban infrastructure inspection and maintenance.

Professor Sarah Rushinek of the University of Miami explained that her research group advises the City of Coral Gables in evaluating technologies for smart city applications. The panel focused explicitly on Remote Video Inspection (RVI) solutions that enable central monitoring of field inspectors examining buildings and infrastructure.

RVI technologies highlighted included head-mounted computers like the RealWear HMT-1Z1 tablet that can livestream point-of-view video. Voice commands and AI assistance allow handsfree navigation of apps and recording functionality. Dr. Avi Rushinek explained that an experienced inspector could simultaneously oversee multiple junior field inspectors troubleshooting issues in real time via the stream. Built-in cellular connectivity ensures continuous operation if Wi-Fi or wired networks become unavailable.

The panel also assessed the potential of augmented reality (AR) helmets like the Microsoft HoloLens 2. Integrating camera feeds with layered digital information and simulations lets inspectors visualize building plans or highlight points of concern during examinations. Generative AI chatbots like CallAnnie.AI can transcribe voice conversations from the field and summarize

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findings in customized reports tailored to engineers, officials, and the public.

According to panelist Denise Mendez, a Microsoft engineer, cities accumulate massive datasets from infrastructure sensors that sit siloed and underutilized.

Cities could train customized AI models by aggregating and processing this big data with machine learning. Beyond powering conversational assistants, these models could extract insights from field images, paperwork, and maintenance logs to predict safety issues.

For example, Mendez described combining drone photography and AI to create 3D digital models of buildings. The models help Avi and Sara Rushinek at Smart City Expo Miami

assess structural integrity, facilitating remote inspections when on-site visits prove difficult.

Additionally, AR devices allow overlaying the models with other information like electrical diagrams or flood visualizations.

Panelists were optimistic that collaborative human-AI systems can bolster smart cities. However, they cautioned that adopting emerging technologies requires overcoming practical hurdles. Solutions like RVI equipment and AI modeling necessitate upfront funding, stakeholder buy-in, and worker retraining. Regardless, creative incorporation of data-driven innovations promises to increase urban sustainability, safety, and quality of life.

Sara Rushinek, Avi Rushinek, and Denise Mendez at Smart City Expo Miami

Sara Rushinek Professor, University of Miami

Avi Rushinek Professor, University of Miami

Denise Mendez Engineer, Microsoft Mixed Reality

Miami, Florida

Miami, Florida

Miami, Florida

Dr. Sara Rushinek, a professor of business technology and health informatics at the UM Herbert Business School, is renowned for her groundbreaking contributions to the field. Inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame, her expertise spans AI, big data analytics, health informatics, cybersecurity, and blockchain. Rushinek is an advisor in Smart City Initiatives for the City of Coral Gables. With her dedication to advancing AI applications, she has become a leading force in cutting-edge technologies that transform academia, industry, and entrepreneurship.

Avi Rushinek, an accounting professor, is a prominent figure in the realm of AI and machine learning business applications with extensive expertise in data analytics, blockchain, business intelligence, algorithmic formulation for SEO and trading systems, forensic accounting, fraud examination, and mobile app development. Rushinek’s focus lies in advancing AI and machine learning technologies for practical business applications. He advises and consults with finance and high-tech companies and is pivotal in guiding the City of Coral Gables in its Smart City Initiatives.

Denise Mendez is a solutions-oriented cross-functional systems engineer, leading strategy, driving solutions, creating value, and engineering in the gaps, with a proven track record of unlocking simple solutions within complex systems. She is proven in tactical execution using technical depth, product lifecycle experience, and deep listening skills to break out the interdepartmental win-win solutions.

She is also an expert in architecting, scaling, building, and deploying complex hardware, software, and cloud systems from inception to launch in any vertical.

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SMART TAIPEI:

GOVERNMENT AS A PLATFORM; CITY AS A LIVING LAB PRESENTATION BY DR. CHEN-YU LEE AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Taipei Smart City office aims to implement an ecosystem to combine industry and government resources to develop smart solutions that can satisfy public demands. Since Taipei Smart City office was established in 2016, it has assisted Taipei City Government with diverse smart city projects, including smart mobility, smart education, smart building, and smart health, in both top-down policy and bottom-up POC (Proof of Concept) projects.

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hat is a smart city? When we discuss the definition of a smart city, you will find that each city has its own definition. This is because every city has its own culture and industrial conditions.

And every city has different issues, whether budget or demographic issues. So, every city needs to develop its own vision.

It’s easy for people to get confused about defining a smart city as a fantasy city, especially now that many new terms are coming out, like 5G, artificial intelligence, blockchain, NFT, virtual currency, autonomous vehicles, and more.

Many cities are also emphasizing building happy cities, but this is not what smart cities provide; making people’s lives easier and more convenient does not mean they will be happy. So, the core of smart cities should be the digital transformation of the city—improving cities through digital transformation.

When discussing the main issues of smart cities, everyone should agree that sustainability and problem-solving are the two most important goals.

Sustainability There are two concepts of sustainability: environmental sustainability and service sustainability. Environmental sustainability is easier to understand, as the purpose of saving energy and carbon production can be achieved through intelligent methods.

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However, service sustainability is something that people often overlook. Cities are accustomed to using their budgets to purchase new technologies and services.

However, budgets are always limited, and many services cannot be maintained by government resources alone. Therefore, new cooperation with industry is needed.

The PPP model is extremely important.

Sometimes, finding the right business model (with the support of the city government) and allowing industries to provide valuable services to citizens will be a more sustainable model so that the government will transform into a service provision platform, not just a service provider. Of course, this requires a lot of adjustments to regulations, organizational transformation, education, and integration.

Problem-Solving There are also two directions for “solving problems.” One is to solve existing tangible

services for citizens, such as uneven roads, traffic congestion, noise problems, air pollution, insufficient education, old building maintenance, etc. These are very specific problems that need to be solved intelligently, and usually, they can be resolved by industrial solutions.

However, the thing people will easily ignore is to solve problems faced by the digital transformation of city government, such as organizational transformation. To achieve a cooperation mechanism between the public and private sectors, the previous organizational structure will inevitably not be successful, and it needs to be revised based on the city’s goals. The city needs to transform or establish new units and operating models. For example, in Taipei, a dedicated PMO office was established by an external consultant organization to create a professional and innovative operating platform where the teams will not be

“ TO ACHIEVE A COOPERATION MECHANISM BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTORS, THE PREVIOUS ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE WILL INEVITABLY NOT BE SUCCESSFUL...THE CITY NEEDS TO TRANSFORM OR ESTABLISH NEW UNITS AND OPERATING MODELS.”

Taipei, Taiwan

© SMART TAIPEI

restricted by their status as public servants.

Another, more important, thing is the adjustment mindset and implementation.

The introduction of innovative solutions will inevitably face many failures, so challenging the system and establishing a government system that can accept failures is one of the key points.

I take Taipei City as an example of the above two points. In the past eight years, based on our philosophy, we have established a very strong collaborative ecosystem with the private sector and have turned it into a mature system through continuous revisions. We provide an experimental mechanism that can fail in the first phase. We test any and all possibilities and gradually turn successful cases into real policy. This is a very important concept when the government is solving digital transformation.

© ITRASH

iTrash, Taipei To encourage waste reduction and recycling by citizens, Smart Taipei activated the iTrash services. Available 24/7, it integrates cloud and IoT technologies to provide weight billing and recycling compensation, which is accessible by using electronic tickets (EasyCards).

Chen-Yu Lee Director, Smart Taipei Taipei, Taiwan Dr. Chen-Yu Lee is the CEO of International Cooperation Center for Taipei Computer Association (TCA) as well as the secretary general for GO SMART and Director for Taipei Smart City Project Management Office (TPMO) established by Taipei City Government. Before serving at TCA, Lee worked in the Institute for Information Industry (III) to strengthen the competitiveness of the information industry. Lee has worked on numerous central government projects, including Smart City Promotion Project, Cloud Computing Industry Project, UX Project, E-learning Project, etc., and had over 15 years of research experience in ICT-related industry.

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INCLUSIVE & SHARING

TRUST AND CITIES PRESENTATION BY SANDRA BAER AND DR. LAWRENCE JONES AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

The pervasive decline of trust in society is an existential threat that we must address. No current or future challenge can be resolved without a foundation of trust among people. Trust is an indispensable currency of human interactions, and without trust, societies based on human interaction will not function well.

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hroughout history, mistrust has always been the source of conflict between humans. Lack of trust is at the core of family disagreements, national disunity and polarization, international disputes, and power struggles.

Because cultural and value wars are often rooted in a lack of trust, we see an evergrowing lack of political will across public and private enterprises and civic, academic, and philanthropic institutions, giving rise to a growing crisis of trust in leadership.

My business colleague, Dr. Lawrence Jones, and I believe we live in an increasingly multi-polar world of polycrises that, if left unaddressed, will force us to live in a world lacking compassion, cooperation, and understanding. A spiral of negative consequences will ensue, stemming from the climate crisis, mass migration, social and economic inequalities, runaway urbanization, geopolitical conflicts, financial turmoil, water-heat-energy-food insecurity, and the pace of technology that we do not control, to name a few.

We believe that our inability to address these complex challenges (these “wicked problems”), both locally and globally, is rooted in the decline of trust at all levels of society. The vexing trust deficit is the greatest existential threat to humanity. No current or future challenge can be resolved without a foundation of trust among people. Trust is an indispensable currency of human interactions, and without trust, societies based on human interaction will not function well.

The Impact of a Vexing Trust Deficit Judging from the current socioeconomic, political, and environmental situation around the globe, humanity is on the perilous path

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toward a world with increasingly low levels of trust—a world where we cannot assume the integrity and honesty of others, a world that is based on extreme skepticism and paranoia, where we lack the ability to have civil discourse or thoughtful conversations between one another.

How can we change our intransigence and resistance to becoming trustworthy?

This essential question requires us to find the courage and commitment to seek answers to difficult, complex questions—without jumping to conclusions, assuming we are right, or the absolute certainty or conviction that another is wrong!

The erosion of trust in the world today can be seen all around us, in part accelerated by the speed and scale of access to information.

We appreciate the consequences of ubiquitous instant access to what is happening everywhere in the world. Greater accountability due to more interconnectivity and transparency is indeed a positive, but on the other hand, trust declines as misinformation and disinformation spread rapidly. Unlike a pandemic, there is no quick vaccine to immunize us against the information virus that is slowly moving us to a dangerous, trustless world.

Why Must We Rebuild Trust and How? Four years ago, we developed a Question Storming framework to address complex issues and difficult problems. Rather than jumping to quick “solutions,” the Question Storming approach requires intensive listening and continued questioning to see the problem through the lens of others—it requires us to think differently and ultimately to take new action. In 2020, we engaged over 300 people from over 30 countries and

six continents. Diversity was our mandate; our participants were of different races, ages, and genders. They also came from different economic, political, social, and cultural backgrounds. Over that year, we explored the complexity of trust and how to rebuild trust once it is broken. We posed the singular question, “How can we rebuild trust in a broken world?” The findings and our subsequent research and explorations led us to new insights. It is clear to us today that our commitment and willingness to answer this most important question is life-changing for us as individuals and as a society.

In our forthcoming book, we will share our empirical research findings and reveal new insights and actions to rebuild trust.

We are confident that we must take ownership to repair the trust deficit. And as a first step, cognizant of the negative consequences of living in a less trusting world, we are compelled to share some core recommendations.

“IT ’S TIME TO ACCELERATE REBUILDING TRUST AT EVERY LEVEL OF SOCIETY TO REVITALIZE HUMANKIND AND SHAPE A SAFER, SUSTAINABLE PLANET.”

Sandra Baer at Smart City Expo Miami

Actions to Take Now 1. Acknowledge the role of fear.

Understand that our lack of trust in society (and indeed our lack of trustworthiness) is often based on fear—fear from feeling blame, from a lack of control, of the unknown, or a lack of transparency. All feelings of fear or uncertainties conspire to diminish our ability to trust one another.

2. Acknowledge the difficulty of gauging the truth, especially as it relates to the ubiquity of content sources from the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence. Appreciate the words of Mark Twain: “A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still tying its shoes.”

3. Avoid gravitating to “information silos,” and try to expand your circle of friends, acquaintances, and business relationships. Trusting people who share our views is easy, but interacting only with like-minded people reinforces existing beliefs and diminishes our willingness to consider different perspectives. To build trust in society, we must build trust among people with differing views.

4. Understand and appreciate “skepticism” as intelligent distrust, but also be willing to accept factual

evidence and trust. Be open to changing your “mental notions” about right and wrong.

5. Understand how “groupthink” often appeals to our desire for belonging and acceptance. Don’t let group labels define you or others. Be open to engaging with others.

6. Be prepared to make sacrifices.

Consider what is at stake in a world with little or low levels of trust. Building trust requires trade-offs—a willingness to step away from safer, easier choices and sometimes to put our current lack of trust on hold to build more trusting relationships in the future.

7. Trust is the foundation of every interaction in life. In fact, our interconnectedness should help foster more, not less, trust. Our actions must demonstrate an understanding of our interdependence on others. Only then can we form more trusting relationships (i.e., no one is an island).

We are certain that everyone on this planet must take ownership now to reduce the trust deficit. A trustless world is an existential threat to our future. It’s time to accelerate rebuilding trust at every level of society to revitalize humankind and shape a safer, sustainable planet.

Sandra Baer CEO, Personal Cities Washington, D.C. Sandra Baer is a champion of creative collaborations between the public and private sectors. She leads Personal Cities, a smart city company focused on city identity and placemaking, social inclusion and equity, climate actions, and accelerating digital technology investments to support innovators and entrepreneurs. She has advised cities in the U.S., Europe, India, and Middle East and has consulted Cityzenith, Citibeats, and Urban Leap. She has served on the board of professional and civic organizations and has held marketing leadership roles with ATT, Speechworks, Discovery Channel, Smart Cities Council, CIVIQ Smartscapes, and Bloomberg Government. Baer is the brand ambassador for SmartCitiesWorld, a special advisor to “Saving the City: Remaking the American Metropolis,” and on the global advisory board of Leading Cities.

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INCLUSIVE & SHARING

THE ALCHEMY OF TRADITION AND INNOVATION: CREATING PEOPLE-CENTRIC CONNECTED COMMUNITIES

PRESENTATION BY DAVID GRAHAM AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

In an era where technology rules, cities can power progress by weaving human values and connectivity into the fabric of strategic innovation. Through strategic investments, datadriven innovation, and a human-centered approach, Carlsbad, California, has artfully blended traditional community values with cutting-edge technology. It’s a lesson on how cities can embrace technology without losing sight of the people they serve.

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he City of Carlsbad occupies a special place in Southern California.

Sitting on the Pacific Ocean’s shores, it’s a vibrant community boasting the largest desalination plant in North America, exciting tourist offerings like Legoland California, and the headquarters of innovative companies like Viasat, TaylorMade, Callaway, and Vuori. It also holds a leadership position among cities using technology and data to create transformational change as connected communities.

I often ponder the notion of transformation—true, deep, seismic shifts in how things are done. And here in Carlsbad, we’re witnessing what I’d call “transformational alchemy.” Now, stay with me here. Alchemy, that medieval pursuit of turning base metals into gold, was a mix of hope, hype, and a dash of delusion. Sounds familiar? It’s kind of like the tech world’s lofty promises: grand visions that too often crash into the hard wall of reality. But we’re taking a different route. We’re not peddling pipe dreams. We’re grounding our tech transformation in reality, proving that change, while challenging, is entirely possible and not something from a science fiction novel.

This is not your typical Silicon Valley story of “move fast and break things.” This is about moving purposefully and fixing things—fixing them for the better, for everyone. We’re creating a connected community that’s as

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sustainable as it is innovative, as inclusive as it is impressive. This is not about adopting new technologies; it’s about fostering a smart, connected, and empathetic community.

Carlsbad’s innovative spirit dates back to its beginning, when an early founder discovered an artesian well that produced alkaline water similar to the famous spring waters in the European spa city of Karlsbad in Bohemia (now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic).

Seeing an opportunity to innovate with this natural resource, Carlsbad became a place known for health and wellness. This historical ingenuity informed a tradition of innovation that is foundational to what we do today: transforming into a connected community where technology is used in a people-centric way to create a vibrant place for all.

Investing in a culture of innovation means more than just technology. It’s about nurturing a mindset of engagement and empowerment within our community.

This ethos is evident in our Data Deputies program, which democratizes data analytics, making it accessible to everyone.

Through our Innovation Sprints program, we identify challenges and opportunities that turn into solutions through the cocreation of rapid prototypes.

Cities sit on vast amounts of data but are challenged with turning it into impactful change. Data is our silent ally, an unassuming yet powerful force that can be

tapped to shape our course with integrity.

So, we build accessible data systems and train employees on how to be innovative with what they have at their fingertips.

Our model of innovation follows the ideas of Dr. David Ricketts from the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard University (TECH). It starts with discovering insights, connecting them to value for the community, creating a shared vision, and effectuating change through action-oriented leadership. This model is applied at all levels of the organization by engaging internally and externally to identify opportunities, empowering our employees to pursue positive change, embedding their discoveries into our systems, and then reimagining our work through a continuous improvement approach.

Our strategic plan, reflecting council goals and community aspirations, guides our connected community initiatives. By aligning technology with these goals, we see innovation as a tool to balance community needs.

Our five strategic goals for Carlsbad resonate with the same values that united our founders. We use a strategic plan dashboard to present these goals in an easily understandable format, reinforcing the community’s involvement in achieving shared objectives.

Public safety is a core objective for all cities, and we’re leveraging data and innovation to keep our community safe.

David Graham at Smart City Expo Miami

A prime example is our fire operation intelligence system. Co-created with the fire department, this tool visualizes realtime emergency services dispatch data to improve operations and provide strategic insights. Robust incident information, mutual aid with neighboring agencies, and trend analysis provide insights for daily operations and long-term strategic investments. The result has been reduced emergency service response times, which translates into saving lives.

In Carlsbad, we focus on translating complex issues into understandable concepts.

The Rosetta Stone serves as a metaphor for this process. Just as it unlocked the secrets of ancient languages, we use what we know to decipher the unknown, applying this principle to emerging technologies like generative AI. Our goal is to connect the unconnected— the people, systems, and values that seem

disparate. We strive to understand each neighborhood’s unique needs, ensuring our technology-driven solutions are deeply rooted in the human experience. Our initiatives, from automated water meter reading and connected traffic signals to neighborhoodbased strategies, aim to find insights that hold real value for our community.

Our preparedness was tested when a tragic accident occurred on our roads that put a spotlight on road safety, particularly related to bicycles and e-bikes. Our foundational work in data and connectivity allowed us to respond swiftly with traffic safety actions. Through education, engineering, and enforcement (what we called the “Three E’s”), the city developed and implemented the Safer Streets Together action plan. We launched comprehensive education programs and used data-driven strategies to improve road safety, ultimately

leading to a significant decrease in injury collisions.

Our journey is not just about achieving a well-managed government certification or accolades. It’s about transforming simple information into valuable insights for our community. By focusing on peoplefirst solutions, we’ve created a culture of engagement and innovation, leading to impactful changes in Carlsbad.

In Carlsbad, we believe that connected communities are about caring—caring for the people in our community and within our organization. This focus on people-first solutions has been the key to our success in building a connected community that truly serves its residents. As we continue to pursue the transformational alchemy that turns what seems to be simple and basic into impactful change, we are discovering a more dynamic, connected, and people-centric city for all.

David Graham Chief Innovation Officer, City of Carlsbad Carlsbad, California A veteran local government advisor, David Graham serves on Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s Executive Leadership team as DCOO for the Office of Neighborhood Services. His work includes the first all-electric car-share fleet in North America, an open-data platform for development permitting, a partnership with GE to deploy sensors in LED-enabled smart streetlights, and using technology to achieve municipal climate change goals. He co-chairs Utilities Advancing Cities, is a Cleantech San Diego board member, serves as an advisor to Smart Cities Connect, and is a regular speaker regarding the municipal perspective on civic innovation.

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INCLUSIVE & SHARING

THE ECOSTEAM PROJECT:

EMPOWERING STUDENTS FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE PRESENTATION BY DR. EDNA PASHER AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Funded by the EU, EcoSteam—an acronym for Ecology and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics)—is a consortium project between Italy, Greece, Croatia, and Israel to increase innovation in sustainability. I represent the Israel Smart Cities Institute as the Israeli coordinator of the EcoSteam project, and in this article, I will tell you about the project, the Israeli pilot, and the techniques we are using.

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he Israel Smart Cities Institute (ISCI) is a not-for-profit NGO focused on public-private partnerships (PPP) to make cities smarter.

For decades, we have been dedicated to overcoming the challenges that arise when cities and technology providers collaborate.

In my early years, I served as an educator, shaping the minds of young individuals. This experience ingrained in me the importance of creativity and critical thinking in education. As the CEO of ISCI, I have channeled this passion into the EcoSteam project. For example, at the beginning of the project, we suggested integrating Arts into STEM, making it STEAM, to prepare our students comprehensively for the challenges of the future, particularly in the context of climate change and sustainability.

Central to our project are four sustainability focus areas: water, waste management, energy usage, and transportation. Each area is led by a partner country, with ISCI assuming responsibility for the water domain. Within this context, we embarked on developing methodologies and educational materials geared toward water conservation, a vital component of sustainable living. Our efforts materialized in the form of practical, hands-on learning experiences meticulously designed for high school students.

Holtz High School in Tel Aviv emerged as our primary testing ground, where students engaged with the innovative materials developed under the EcoSteam project. The students will explore complex challenges

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within the water sector, guided by mentors from the esteemed National Water Company in Israel, “Mekorot.” By emphasizing project-based learning, we empowered these students to not only comprehend the challenges but also devise creative, technology-driven solutions. This approach, rooted in inquiry-based learning, instilled in them critical thinking skills, collaborative spirit, and a sense of responsibility for our environment. Our aim is for the projects to not only enrich students’ knowledge but also create smart solutions. We hope that in the future, more and more solutions will be created by connecting students’ ambition and eagerness with the knowledge and experience of Mekorot professional mentors.

Crucial to the success of EcoSteam is the active participation of cities as stakeholders.

For instance, Eilat, a city renowned for its dedication to smart city projects, stood as a testament to the practical application of our endeavors. The knowledge and expertise

shared within this collaborative network served as a catalyst for innovative solutions and knowledge implementation in realworld scenarios. Moreover, our partnership extended beyond borders, encompassing major cities across Europe, enriching our collaborative network, and expanding the project’s influence globally.

One of the ways that EcoSteam is trying to achieve success is to create an eco-library, a repository of invaluable knowledge and resources. This digital hub welcomes contributions from partners, educators, and enthusiasts, encompassing books, games, online resources, and presentations centered around sustainability. Our vision for the EcoSteam library is ambitious: to become a comprehensive resource, empowering educators and students alike with the tools necessary to address sustainability challenges head-on. We invite everyone passionate about education and sustainability to contribute, transforming this library into a

“BY EMPOWERING STUDENTS THROUGH PRACTICAL, HANDS-ON LEARNING EXPERIENCES AND FOSTERING PARTNERSHIPS WITH CITIES AND STAKEHOLDERS, ECOSTEAM IS NOT MERELY A PROJECT BUT A TRANSFORMATIVE MOVEMENT.”

Edna Pasher Founder and Chair, Israel Smart Cities Institute Tel Aviv, Israel EcoSteam Project, Tel Aviv, Israel

dynamic, interactive platform for learning and collaboration. Send us links and educational materials via info@ecosteam.net.

In conclusion, the EcoSteam Project, funded by the European Union, stands as a beacon of innovation in education and sustainability. The collaboration of Italy, Greece, Croatia, and Israel underscores the global significance of this endeavor, emphasizing the importance of international cooperation in shaping the future of education. By empowering students through

© ISRAEL SMART CITIES INSTITUTE

practical, hands-on learning experiences and fostering partnerships with cities and stakeholders, EcoSteam is not merely a project but a transformative movement. We invite you to contribute to the EcoSteam library. We also invite you to follow us on social media and like the “Project EcoSteam” page on Facebook. Together, we are forging a path toward a sustainable future, one that is built upon knowledge, creativity, and collaboration, ensuring a better tomorrow for generations to come.

Dr. Edna Pasher is the founder and chair of the Israel Smart Cities Institute, a think tank made up of local and global experts who focus on providing smart solutions to municipalities and startups that make our cities smarter and more sustainable. Pasher earned her Ph.D. at New York University in communication arts and sciences and has served as a faculty member at Adelphi University, the City University of New York, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Tel-Aviv University.

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INCLUSIVE & SHARING

PROMOTING SUSTAINABILITY AND RESILIENCE THROUGH TRANSFORMATIVE EDUCATION PRESENTATION BY SARBESWAR PRAHARAJ AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

This article emphasizes the need for new kinds of institutions and curricula to prepare a new generation of the workforce to tackle the looming challenges of climate resilience. It delves into a transformative case study of the Climate Resilience Academy at the University of Miami, which is at the forefront of advancing resilience thinking in the region.

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f you look at the global landscape, over 60% of people currently live in cities, which will only rise in the future. Our communities are increasingly becoming urban. At the same time, those are the communities that are most significantly impacted by the changing climate. We are looking at this nexus through an educational lens. Looking at the federal and state budgets, significant investments are happening in sustainability and resilience. But do we have the workforce to make these changes, design these policies, and take on technological advancements?

Across the world, especially in developing countries, there is a significant need for trained professionals in the urban development sector.

We need more trained professionals who understand resilience and sustainability.

Our education system is fundamentally

designed to look at problems from a sectoral perspective. We have created these barriers to discipline within our educational environments. We look at architecture, engineering, health science, and medical sciences from very segmented perspectives, whereas sustainability or resilience are often talked about as interconnected challenges. So, we must look at education from an innovative and interdisciplinary perspective.

If you look at climate adaptation and resilience, there has been tremendous research in innovation technology.

However, our educational curriculum and materials are not preparing the nextgeneration workforce the way we want: an army of interdisciplinary professionals who could solve these emerging complex challenges. Research published recently highlights not only a lack of curriculum innovation in terms of bridging these research gaps but also a clear failure to understand cities as complex, interlinked,

and interdisciplinary systems, which are increasingly essential to tackling these challenges. At the University of Miami, we are shaping the Climate Resilience Academy, an interdisciplinary academy built with millions of dollars in funding and with the highest level of support from the university. The academy integrates a number of departments, schools, and colleges and belongs to the entire university.

I am a geography faculty member part of the Climate Resilience Academy (resilience.miami.edu). At the same time, we have faculty members from the Engineering School of Business and School of Arts and Sciences all participating in shaping the curricula. We have been reshaping how we think about designing curricula and courses. A flexible program now offered is the Master of Professional Science in Urban Sustainability and Resilience. This is a flagship course in the university and a rarity in this country. The

“ THE GOAL IS TO HELP STUDENTS GO OUT TO THE MARKET KNOWING WHAT RESILIENCE IS AND HOW INTERDISCIPLINARY AND SYSTEM-WIDE APPROACHES COULD BE NURTURED AND PRACTICED IN THE REAL WORLD. ” 82 | Smart City Miami

Sarbeswar Praharaj at Smart City Expo Miami

Sarbeswar Praharaj Assistant Professor, University of Miami Miami, Florida Sarbeswar Praharaj, Ph.D., joins the University of Miami as an assistant professor with shared responsibilities between the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development and the School of Architecture. He previously served as the associate director and assistant research professor at the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University. Sarbeswar holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and was also a postdoctoral researcher at the City Futures Research Center at UNSW Sydney. Sarbeswar’s research and teaching interests combine critical applications of geospatial data science and smart city technologies for shaping more inclusive, sustainable, and climate-resilient communities.

courses that are offered break down those different silos and disciplinary boundaries.

They are designed to bring different perspectives and courses under the same umbrella. Students can take courses in infrastructure and environment, economic development, human and societal health, and more, preparing them to gain crossboundary knowledge and expertise. How different urban sectors are interlinked with climate change stressors and ways to design solutions are also part of the learning portfolio. The goal is to help students go out to the market knowing what resilience is and how interdisciplinary and system-wide approaches could be nurtured and practiced in the real world.

One course from this Master of Professional Science in Urban Sustainability

and Resilience program is titled Introduction to Resilience and is taught by 13 of our premier faculty members. This is probably not found anywhere in the country where just one three-credit course is taught by so many experts. Among the different modules, students are appraised of topics such as understanding the history of global climate change and how geographic information systems and technologies could be used to address resiliency challenges. Students of this course also study extreme weather events, hurricane and flood surge protection policies, and engineering approaches. They are trained in data literacy and data science approaches to solve resiliency challenges.

They critically investigate climate-driven migration, environmental injustices, and disaster vulnerability. You can see this course

is breaking the disciplinary silos. Essentially, it doesn’t follow boundaries, and that’s why you need these kinds of interdisciplinary curricula. The faculty members teaching this course belong to marine sciences, engineering, computer science, communication, architecture, geography, and many more. This innovative approach brings together diverse perspectives from a wide range of specialty disciplines for students to approach complex challenges.

The way we are redesigning the curriculum through the Climate Resilience Academy at the University of Miami is the need of the hour, especially in Miami, which is at the forefront of climate change. Building resilience in our society through infrastructure and education is paramount. Feel free to explore the flagship program on our website, urb.as.miami.edu.

Smart City Miami | 83

SMART CITY SUMMIT & EXPO

SMART CITY SUMMIT & EXPO TAIPEI PRESENTATION BY PHILIP WANG AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Taiwan has made a remarkable economic transformation from an agricultural hub to a global technology leader. Explore its pivotal role in the global supply chain and join us at the 2024 Smart City Summit & Expo to witness Taiwan’s commitment to innovation and smart city development.

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t was a great honor and pleasure to be back in Miami, where I lived and worked for seven years and witnessed numerous advancements since the 1980s.

I remember escorting mayors from Taiwan in the mid-’80s to study and emulate Miami’s Metrorail and Metromover systems. Today, Taipei’s Metro Rapid Transit service, featuring the same dual systems as Miami, transports an average of 2 million people every day.

Understanding the Taiwan Advantage Taiwan, a 14,000-square-mile island southeast of the Chinese mainland and separated by the Taiwan Strait, was recovered from Japan by the Republic of China government after World War II. Initially, it was a post-colonial agricultural economy. Today, it stands as one of the most advanced regions globally, with integrated high-tech supply chains.

Being a mountainous island with scarce natural resources, Taiwan has primarily developed its human resources. In 2005, BusinessWeek featured a cover story, “Why Taiwan Matters,” stating that the world economy couldn’t function without it. Eighteen years have passed, and Taiwan’s strategic role has become even more important.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the people of Taiwan have spared no effort in advancing themselves over the past decades.

Over the last 30 years, Taiwan’s foreign reserve holdings have consistently ranked at the forefront globally. The latest figures indicate reserves exceeding $560 billion, ranking Taiwan fourth in the world, second only to the Chinese mainland, Japan, and Switzerland. Taiwan has also emerged as a

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major global investor.

Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm’s SVP, highlighted Taiwan’s supply chain as critical to the artificial intelligence ecosystem, while Lisa Su, President and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, acknowledged AMD’s reliance on its Taiwan supply chain.

Industrial Characteristics in Taiwan Taiwan’s economic evolution has transitioned from a post-colonial agricultural economy through various stages: import-substitute for preserving foreign reserves, labor-intensive export-oriented to accumulate foreign reserves, and, now, into high-tech and capitalintensive, with numerous industrial clusters.

In Taiwan, major corporations are often surrounded by dozens of satellite factories.

Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing

has significantly contributed to the world.

In 2022, statistics showed that Taiwan’s wafer foundries accounted for 64% of the world’s total output, while its testing, assembly, and packaging comprised 59% of the global production. For IC chips under 7 nanometers, Taiwan contributed approximately 70% to the world’s output.

2024 Smart City Summit & Expo The Taipei Computer Association, established in 1974, responded to the urging of its 4,000+ corporate members in the early 2010s by launching the Smart City Summit & Expo program. The 11th session of this expo is scheduled for March 2024, and Paul Pong, the incumbent chairman, has dedicated himself, along with all my associates, to advancing the largest smart city event in the Asia-Pacific region. You are all invited to join us in Taiwan.

“ TAIWAN’S ECONOMIC EVOLUTION HAS TRANSITIONED FROM A POST-COLONIAL AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY... TO HIGH-TECH AND CAPITAL-INTENSIVE, WITH NUMEROUS INDUSTRIAL CLUSTERS.”

Philip Wang at Smart City Expo Miami

During the 2023 SCSE, over 550 domestic and international companies and government agencies participated, showcasing their products and services in 2,000 booths. Approximately 130,000 visitors and global leaders engaged in numerous summits, forums, and matchmaking sessions under B2B, G2G, and G2B arrangements.

The SCSE also hosts co-located expos, including Smart Health, Smart Building, Smart Education, Intelligent Transportation Control System, and Net Zero.

Over the years, companies in Taiwan have progressed from computer manufacturing to integrated industrial computers. They have combined AI, deep learning, machine learning, and advanced algorithms, further integrating them with lidar, radar, and camera sensors, to serve various aspects of daily life.

During the expo and field trips, attendees can interact directly with engineers and experts, gaining insights into their system developments and applications. Last March, I had the honor of inviting the founder of Smart City Miami Expo, Bernardo Scheinkman, to our expo, where he engaged in fruitful discussions with many mayors worldwide about smart city development.

You can meet leaders not only from Taiwan but also from other countries. Last March, we arranged more than 550 matchmaking sessions, fostering numerous collaborations.

Achievements by industrial computer manufacturers, such as embedded

solutions, were exhibited across various fields. For instance, Syscom Group’s Ayuda robots are distributed in numerous locations in Taiwan and Japan, including hospitals, libraries, shopping centers, and city halls.

MiTAC’s Mosquito Management System has been adopted by several countries to combat epidemics, while the E-Gate Automatic Immigration Clearance Solution is implemented in many Asian nations.

Various applications in water resources and wastewater management, smart irrigation, electricity grid solutions, AIpowered chilled water energy-saving systems, transportation, EV powertrain solutions, iHospitals, iLogistics, and innovative solutions for voice and speech disorders are available, catering to current high demands for smarter cities and services.

Overall, the event is a comprehensive and all-inclusive platform aiming to showcase ways to achieve an accessible, inclusive, and sustainable community. This four-day program presents: • A cross-industrial platform • A multidisciplinary integration stage • A system integration paradigm • A small and medium enterprises developmental model • A showcase of the amalgamation of high-tech supply chains Regardless of your level of understanding and involvement in information technology, you can gain inspiration from this annual event. I invite you to witness the techniques contributed by Taiwan to the world.

Philip Wang Senior Global Advisor, Smart City Promotion Team, Taipei Computer Association Taipei, Taiwan Philip T Y Wang is an experienced business manager with a demonstrated history of working in the research industry. He is skilled in international relations, management, policy analysis, business development, and marketing strategy. He is a strong sales professional with a certificate focused in the Senior Leadership Development Programme from the National School of Government in the United Kingdom.

For more information about the 2024 Smart City Summit & Expo and enrollment, visit en.smartcity.org.tw or smartcity.org.tw/m_login.php.

Smart City Miami | 85

AI SUMMIT FOR MAYORS

AI SUMMIT FOR MAYORS:

THE POTENTIAL OF AI TO IMPROVE OUR CITIES This year’s Smart City Expo Miami brought together an impressive lineup of speakers who discussed the potential for AI to shape and better the future of urban living. AI is traditionally associated with the tech or financial industries, but it has recently started to be used in city governance and management. The summit was held at the AI Center at Miami Dade College.

A GENERATIVE AI PRIMER FOR MAYORS KEYNOTE BY DR. JONATHAN REICHENTAL, CEO, HUMAN FUTURE

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verybody uses AI many times a day.

It is baked into so many parts of our lives that you don’t even realize you’re using it. But AI isn’t something that happened in November 2022; it’s been an area of research and development and implementation for 70 years.

The Foundations of AI I like to use Miriam Webster’s definition of AI, which is the capability of machines to imitate human behavior. The word artificial is very specific in that it doesn’t try to be real intelligence. The type of AI we use today is narrow AI, meaning the software is very good at doing specific tasks. It’s not general intelligence, it’s not applicable to lots of different things, and it’s not graded.

Popular AI Use Cases One of the ways you see AI being used is that you don’t get enormous volumes of email spam anymore. AI software is blocking emails by looking for certain patterns and signatures.

It’s also baked into enterprise applications, financial tools, and analysis tools.

You also use AI when you use your credit card. For example, if you get a text or a call that says they’ve detected unusual behavior on your credit card. People aren’t checking every transaction, but AI looks for patterns, and if something doesn’t look right, you get the alert.

A 70-Year Journey AI is the culmination of 70 years of research.

It started in 1950 in the U.S. at Dartmouth College, where some researchers, engineers, and scientists coined the term artificial

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intelligence. They understood the potential of software to do pattern recognition to imitate certain human behaviors, but they didn’t know how. The idea was that within a few months, they would figure it out.

Decades later, we’ve barely begun.

Every decade since has seen some breakthroughs. In the ’60s, we had natural language processing and chatbots. In the ’70s, we had leaps in robotics and machinery in factories for sensors detecting behaviors or anomalies. The ’90s was when IBM was developing AI software to beat a human in chess. In the 2000s, you saw the integration of thinking software and things like Roomba.

But in the 2020s, we have turned a corner.

Even before ChatGPT, we heard a lot about AI because of autonomous vehicles.

Just a few years ago, the notion was cars could drive themselves some of the time, but when you got into a dense urban center, there would be too many variables. But we’ve pushed through and achieved fully autonomous vehicles. This is an incredible technological achievement.

The Turing Test The Turing Test is an interesting thought experiment that asks whether a person can determine if they are talking to a computer or a person. Computers generally don’t do a very good job of imitating humans and don’t pass the Turing Test. With a few questions, a person can determine that it’s either a human or a computer. If the person can’t tell, it means the Turing Test has passed.

Now that ChatGPT and chatbots are out,

the question still is: Can we tell? We’re close.

Some people will argue we passed it. Others say it’s not quite close enough. Eventually, you figure out it’s a computer because it messes up. This will continue to be an important test.

The Big Picture The real aspiration is that AI becomes more generalized, can solve lots of different human problems and challenges, and is almost equivalent to human thinking, that the software becomes good enough to emulate and imitate a lot of what humans do, where it is hard to tell and differentiate from what a human does. We’re not there. We don’t have AGI (artificial general intelligence) today. But some think that we’re not too far.

Now, beyond that is another idea of ASI, artificial superintelligence. This is totally the realm of fiction. It is only in our minds that computers are much smarter than humans.

In a world of artificial superintelligence, computers might resolve that humans are “in the way.” Some people believe that we either shouldn’t go into AGI or ASI and that we need safeguards. Once you unleash this, you can’t put it back in the box.

What Is Driving Accelerated AI Innovation?

What is allowing us to have the rate of change and these incredible AI breakthroughs? A series of important milestones are taking place, one of which is that we live in what is known as the Zettabyte Era. Today, we have about 120 zettabytes of information stored in the world. We will create that again in the next three years.

“ THE BEST AND WORST ARE YET TO COME, AND WE NEED TO BE READY FOR IT. WE NEED TO EMBRACE IT. OTHERS WILL.” Jonathan Reichental at the AI Summit for Mayors at Smart City Expo Miami

Everything we do is generating data. That becomes the food for AI. The more data you have, the better AI is. There’s a direct correlation between those two things.

There is also a market for it. When you have a healthy marketplace, innovation usually follows. Plus, that market condition creates intense competition, which in itself drives innovation. These are some of the dynamics at play, which means more and better AI over the next few years and decades.

What Is Generative AI? Generative AI is the technology behind the ChatGPT. It is the ability of the computer to respond to a prompt we type. And that prompt is any type of question or action that we request. It processes that prompt and comes back with an output. It could be text, graphics, audio, or different media. Unlike a Google search, thousands and thousands of results in ChatGPT will get one concise output.

ChatGPT Uses What kind of prompts do we use, and what output do we get? If you say to draw a picture of a frog on a bicycle, it doesn’t know what a frog or a bicycle is, but it knows data, and it can bring back the pixels and draw that. Generative AI does not know the context; it’s just doing some very smart mathematics, statistics, and computer science and getting a reasonable probability of an outcome. Where does the data come from? It’s our data. We wrote it.

When you go to Google, it gives you the result. But if you follow up with “tell

me more,” Google will have no idea what you’re trying to say. Generative AI remembers the conversation. You can follow up and say, “I want to know more about that part of what you just told me.”

You can have this continuous conversation.

I like the summarization capability. If you get a big explanation from a book or something online, just copy it into ChatGPT and say, can you summarize this? If you like to write but are not a great writer, you can copy what you’ve written and say, could you write this better? And it’ll do it for you.

Constructing a Prompt Be specific and start your sentence with action words like create, summarize, and identify. Tell it what you want to do. And that’s where you start to see some of the personalization. The real power here is to build context and get specific about the answer that makes the most sense. A good prompt might look like this: I want to increase my bicep muscles. List exercises for a 30-minute workout for a middle-aged man. I might add at the end in my hotel room or the gym, whichever makes sense, because it will alter it depending on how you type that.

How Is Local Government Using ChatGPT? As a mayor, city manager, or city principal, you could type things like, “List five things that make downtown a vibrant area.” And then, drill into the question of what are some contemporary construction techniques to preserve the environment or how we can utilize water better in this environment. You can use

it to create emails, generate reports or social media posts, draft meeting schedules, create website chatbots, and analyze patterns in crime reports. The more specific you are, the better the answer. The sky’s the limit.

Concerns about AI There’s a lot we don’t know. Many of our projections are hypothetical. One of the things we talk about the fears of AI is a concept called the alignment problem. When we ask AI to do something, will it do what we think it will? How will we ensure that AI is aligned with our aspirations, beliefs, and values? That’s a big part of the challenges ahead.

This is fundamental software that can change just about everything we do. For that reason, we need to be deliberate and thoughtful about the solutions we build and what the potential outcomes will be.

A big message for mayors and city leaders is that you must understand we’re not in the middle of this revolution. We’re not welladvanced yet. We’re at the beginning, and November 2022 was the start and the first indication of what’s possible. The best and worst are yet to come, and we need to be ready for it. We need to embrace it. Others will.

It’s time to queue up training so people know what this is, the basic uses of it, its potential, and how they can incorporate it into work.

Training is the most logical next step for cities.

And then, beyond that, is starting to explore how it can make your community better. Can it be a conversational bot that answers questions for you? Can you respond and create policies faster? How can it help your city?

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AI SUMMIT FOR MAYORS

AI’S POTENTIAL IN THE GOVERNMENT CONTEXT PRESENTATION BY DAVID GRAHAM, CIO, CITY OF CARLSBAD, CALIFORNIA

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would posit the idea that artificial intelligence is not intelligence. I’ll go back to an example from the 1700s. Every year for about 20 years, Ben Franklin published the Poor Richard’s Almanack, which was based upon the collected human observation and information, allowing people to predict what would happen that season, when they should plant their seeds, harvest, etc. In 2023, AI is not much more than an incredibly sophisticated Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Why? Because it is a prediction engine taken from huge amounts of information.

Over time, it is learning, so it gets to this level of prediction that we attribute intelligence to. But in and of itself, there is nothing new created by artificial intelligence. It is just selecting based on everything it has learned.

And that is based on probability.

The three most important concepts when applying AI in government are not thinking of it as independently intelligent but as a prediction engine. And those three concepts are whether it is valuable, confidential, and accountable.

And that is how we in government must consider the use and usability of AI. Confidentiality In government, most of our records are public.

But if your organization has confidential information, you may think somehow ChatGPT has the same level of confidentiality as everything else in your systems. It’s not true.

And therein lies an important lesson: Anything put into these models is not confidential. It’s no longer your own. There are a few exceptions, but by and large, you have to think that everything that you enter into that system is out there for the world to see.

Accountability Some people question whether we should use generative AI or not. It’s not a big scary thing, and it’s not much different than what you have to do today. When you are a management analyst and have to write a staff report, who’s ultimately responsible if there’s incorrect or biased information? You are.

In Carlsbad, the use of generative AI is

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occurring for all sorts of different purposes, from drafting emails or reports down to coding aspects. All these things are usable, but our staff recognizes they’re ultimately responsible for what comes out. That accountability is no different than before. However, it is crucial to recognize that there is a myth of AI and generative AI about objectivity because it is based upon vast amounts of human knowledge. The myth is that because it’s a computer, it doesn’t have a bias or is always accurate; all of that is not the case. AI is a mirror of humanity, unfortunately, of our subjectivity, biases, and collective wisdom that may or may not be right. So, ultimately, you have to be responsible for what comes out of it.

Valuable Just because it’s new, different, and interesting doesn’t necessarily mean that there is value for your organization or government. But if there is, training people to use it can be incredibly valuable. AI is in many systems that we do and experience every day, but the fact we can converse with it is the disruption point for why we’re talking so much about it.

Finding value, where it fits to augment, support, and help humanity and your organization be better, more efficient, fully accountable, and cognizant of any of the potential for exposing information, is where government needs to be. We are ultimately getting down to where the fundamental value for our organization is going to be. AI has incredible potential to support so many different areas of what we’re doing.

AI is moving into systems you won’t even recognize or know it’s being used for. And so the time right now is to train, educate, and understand its usability and create that responsibility in being able to use it. It’s time to get on the education bandwagon, help people understand, learn, and tailor whatever your approach is for your organization. But don’t assume that you can stop it. It’s here.

My team uses AI on a regular basis. We train around doing individual innovation, bringing those ideas to a collective

David Graham at the AI Summit for Mayors at Smart City Expo Miami

co-creation session. And then, in that session, people have already formulated their thoughts and ideas. You contribute and work to pull all the best out of the chat.

ChatGPT is a great assistant to pinging a lot of that stuff off before that session or if you have questions. It also is good at writing and rewriting content. One of the things it can do is provide massive amounts of information.

You can talk to generative AI about what you are thinking about and ask it to provide information and feedback.

Another thing is the generation of staff reports. We started using AI to take statistical survey data and generate reports.

We also use it for our innovation sessions.

However, it still requires a significant amount of human engagement and intervention on the coding side.

Something I don’t find it helpful for is being creative. Just because in a couple of minutes, I can put in a few prompts and have a beautiful, realistic picture pop up doesn’t mean it is creative. One of the big debates with the Actors’ Guild in their fight is not whether AI can generate scripts. The big thing they’re fighting about is origin. That origin idea is still the basis in a place where human creativity lives.

It does a good job but has some significant flaws. Another thing it’s not good at doing is if you have a series of codes and say, what are the problems with this or why is this not working? Ultimately, changing it from simulating a human to being an actual human work is where the value comes in. We still have quite a ways to go with this particular technology, but it’s incredibly valuable today.

HOW CAN AI BE USED TO ENHANCE DISASTER RESPONSE AND MANAGEMENT IN CITIES? PRESENTATION BY RAIMUNDO RODOLFO, CIO, CITY OF CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA

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hirty years ago, I was an engineer in the telecom industry. My first job was to apply AI to do a better diagnostic of failures in electronic hardware. I started playing with that. And it was very interesting, even though my work was more electrical. I began to be asked to replicate that experience to design expert systems for fault tolerance and analytics in communications in the industry.

They started using a lot of those capabilities to automate the detection of failures between microwave links that were communicating the early urban networks.

That paved the way for more intelligent networks and the things that we use today, like smartphones and many capabilities that pave the way for what we call today smart communications, smart cities, ICT, or ICI, a new term, intelligent connected infrastructure.

When I joined the City of Coral Gables, one of the first problems we had was the hurricanes that were bringing 80% of power down. We were losing communication. So, we developed a network that had intelligence for automated failovers. Automatically, that intelligence comes from very sophisticated algorithms—call it AI, call it some sort of advanced software. But those analytics were early in our network.

Later, we had the challenge that attacks and malware were very sophisticated, too, because they were using AI in the early ’90s.

My experience is that AI was used to develop viruses; they also used genetic algorithms to learn about your networks and discover and attack you better.

I’m talking about when we had the first computer virus in personal computer networks. That’s happening today more aggressively. We have adversarial AI. We are living in the era of AI versus AI, so we have to protect the information assets of our customers, our citizens, and our

employees. We also started employing AI for advanced threat detection or ATD to detect behavior because old-fashioned antiviruses were based on signatures or traces. That doesn’t work anymore. It’s about behavior.

Behavioral analytics applied to AI that required advanced AI to counter that offense.

That’s another early use of AI in our city.

But then we started looking at how we can have cyber-physical visibility and sense traffic and automate some of the processes in traffic management or police safety. Then we started using computer vision. All those CCTV cameras and sensors that are optical have AI and algorithms that can detect, classify, analyze, and visualize multimodal objects in traffic—vehicles, bicycles, micromobility people, pedestrians, etc.

We are getting that data. That’s AI, too.

We have been using AI for a long time in the industry. For me, it’s like part of the job we do in all those different fields, sectors, and industries. And I’m applying that experience from the private sector to the public sector. To me, it’s like a continuation of an evolution of advanced software capabilities, and software engineering will continue to advance. I don’t think that if we stop it somewhere, the consumer market is using it.

How can you align with the consumer market? The consumer market is driving the life of smart homes. The smart home is the cell, the fabric of smart communities and smart cities. You’re going to have smart homes and municipalities that are not embracing the same things that your citizens are embracing and are demanding you also enable those capabilities.

Raimundo Rodolfo at the AI Summit for Mayors at Smart City Expo Miami

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AWARDS

WHO’S WHO IN SUSTAINABILITY: IN FOCUS AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI 2023

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n recent years, sustainability has become a pressing concern for citizens and communities across the globe. As people become more aware of environmental and social issues, they are recognizing the importance of incorporating sustainable practices into their own lives and in their communities. Sustainability reshapes the way we live and the actions we take within our communities. As we build toward a cleaner future, we must adopt renewable energy sources and resource-efficient practices and collaborate with community members. Going forward, adopting these practices will help cities on a path toward a more environmentally and socially responsible future.

Our “Who’s Who In Sustainability” top award at Smart City Expo Miami highlights the leading innovators who have made significant contributions to advancing sustainability at the community level. As we move toward a more uncertain climate future, we need people who are using design, technology, and innovation to help create environmentally sustainable solutions. Smart City Expo Miami brought together some of these top innovators to discuss plans for the future of urban life, and a group of them were recognized for their exemplary work. Sara Pezeshk, Raimundo Rodulfo, Inna Braverman, Ebru Ozer, Bonnie Schneider, and Biayna Bogosian stood out for their outstanding contributions to sustainability efforts.

Bernardo Scheinkman, CEO and founder of Smart Cities Americas, kicked off the ceremony: “I’m thrilled to present some of the top changemakers in our community with awards to acknowledge their invaluable work. These individuals are shaping the future with their commitment to sustainability and innovative thinking.”

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Let’s dive in to learn a little more about their outstanding accomplishments.

SUSTAINABLE GENERATIVE DESIGN: SARA PEZESHK

Sara Pezeshk currently serves as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the CREST Center for Aquatic Chemistry and Environment and the Institute of Environment at Florida International University. For her work on creating a data-driven hybrid shoreline infrastructure, she was awarded the certificate for her outstanding performance for sustainable generative design. Her project addressed the impact of climate change on coastal areas by using biomarine titles. These tiles are made up of both concrete and natural organisms, such as mangroves and seagrass, to create resilient shorelines. The bio-tiles were tested on the North Biscayne Bay shoreline, showing promise for further ecosystem protection.

NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS: EBRU OZER

Ebru Ozer also integrates nature-based elements with man-made materials and spaces. Ozer founded LandscapeDE, LLC, with Douglas Thompson, which collaborates with Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation, and Open Spaces to revolutionize playground design. While traditional playgrounds limit children’s connection with nature, their approach integrates expansive spaces and lush plantings in various playgrounds across Miami. Ozer aims to reconnect children with nature and foster sustainable and smart communities.

She was awarded the certificate for her work designing sustainable nature-based solutions.

“I am deeply honored to have received the Who’s Who in Sustainability Award and have had the privilege of delivering a keynote at the Smart City Expo Miami 2023: Building Sustainable Communities,” Ebru shared. “This event provided an opportunity to address a diverse audience that extended well beyond the landscape architecture community, enabling me to emphasize the transformative power of landscape architecture in shaping smart, resilient, and sustainable cities to the people who are not in our field.”

SUSTAINABLE INNOVATION: INNA BRAVERMAN

Inna Braverman, the co-founder of Eco Wave Power, grew up in Ukraine, just 300 kilometers from Chernobyl, and suffered respiratory arrest and near death as a result of the nuclear catastrophe.

Having experienced firsthand the dangers of nuclear power, Braverman aims to revolutionize renewable energy. Inna’s remarkable journey led her to consider the power of the ocean—a vast and untapped source of renewable energy.

Under Inna’s leadership, EWP has made tremendous progress on its journey toward commercializing wave energy.

She was awarded the certificate for her exceptional work innovating solutions for sustainable energy. Eco Wave’s patented technology utilizes floaters attached to marine structures and harnesses wave energy. This design has the potential to completely reshape the renewable energy landscape. The company has completed construction of its grid-connected project in Israel, where EWP’s technology was recognized as “Pioneering Technology.”

EWP’s next project is the installation of its

Biayna Bogosian, Ebru Ozer, Inna Braverman, Sara Pezeshk, Bernardo Scheinkman, Bonnie Schneider, Raimundo Rodulfo, Alex Gamundi, and Federico Francesconi

newest pilot in the Port of Los Angeles and a 1 MW installation in Porto, Portugal—it’s only a matter of time until Inna’s vision for a cleaner future reaches more and more cities around the world.

SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION: BIAYNA BOGOSIAN

Biayna Bogosian, assistant professor of Architectural Technology at FIU School of Architecture, asks how immersive, interactive, and participatory urban environmental information representation tools and techniques foster environmental literacy and policy. Her current solution is “In Deep Water,” a groundbreaking Mixed Reality experience that addresses urban environmental data challenges. Using HoloLens2 technology, this interactive storytelling experience engages visitors with real-time and historical water quality data. For her work enhancing public awareness and use of MR for education and information dissemination, Bogosian was awarded the certificate for sustainable environmental action.

SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY: RAIMUNDO RODULFO & CITY OF CORAL GABLES INNOVATION TEAM

Chief Innovation Officer of Coral Gables, Raimundo Rodulfo, and the City of Coral Gables Innovation Team (CGIT) received an award for sustainable technology innovation after presenting their technology infrastructure projects and cutting-edge ecosystems programs for the community. Their project implementing and installing an AI-powered modular pole in Coral Gables—the first of its kind installed in North America—is the result of hard work, collaboration, and a future-driven mindset. The pole currently provides public Wi-Fi, traffic safety cameras and sensors, traffic counters, and environmental sensors and has a hurricane wind-resistant structural design. We can’t wait to see what this team produces in the future.

SUSTAINABLE METEOROLOGIST AUTHOR: BONNIE SCHNEIDER Finally, Bonnie Schneider, founder of

Weather and Wellness, was awarded for her outstanding performance as a sustainable meteorologist author. Schneider has appeared on The Weather Channel several times and previously worked for CNN and HLN. As a meteorologist and special correspondent, she has provided commentary and analysis on the economic impact of science and weather news. Her nonfiction book, Extreme Weather, offers readers insights into natural disasters, including when they’re likely to strike and how to respond when they do. Her presentation at SCEM on integrating weather and wellness into urban planning was extremely valuable for the community.

These innovators are dedicated to sustainability and environmental consciousness, and their work doesn’t go unnoticed. They aim to offer innovative solutions and awareness-building initiatives with groundbreaking technologies.

Smart City Expo Miami was thrilled to acknowledge them all for their contributions to a greener, more sustainable future.

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LAUNCH PAD

HEALTHY HAVOC:

INFRASTRUCTURE DOES NOT FIT WHO WE ARE AS HUMANS PRESENTATION BY ANDY BOENAU AT SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI - BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Americans are in a public health crisis. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, cognitive decline, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and chronic pain are all made worse by infrastructure planned around the automobile. What’s aggravating is that the medical community knows what the human body needs, and the infrastructure community blocks it.

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n March 2022, the CDC published a study that found more than 1 in 3 students felt persistently sad or hopeless. Rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide have steadily climbed over the past decade. More than half of the country is overweight or obese, leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer. Obesity is also bad for the mind, leading to even more anxiety and depression.

The key message from the scientific community is: An active and social life is healthier than an isolated and sedentary life.

The treatment for America’s ever-increasing health problems is infrastructure that promotes physical activity and social connections. That means easy access to amenities and services: housing, schools, parks, plazas, groceries, restaurants, places of worship, swimming pools, retail, dry cleaners, etc. It means being able to walk, walk to a bus stop, ride a bike or trike, or hop on a scooter; these are easy options in a healthy neighborhood.

Medical experts aren’t alone in their diagnosis. Transportation engineers, land-use planners, and politicians make statements about the need for healthy infrastructure all the time. In fact, two of the major professional organizations for engineering and planning have special programs dedicated to improving public health (American Planning Association and Institute of Transportation Engineers).

Everyone knows the treatments, yet the country continues to suffer. Why? I will focus on three groups who are blocking the prescriptions for healthy living: engineers, planners, and politicians.

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How Engineers Block Healthy Living 1. Traffic Analysis Measures the Success of a Road in How Quickly Cars Get Through a Section Engineers use a chart called Level of Service to grade intersections. It’s the key to traffic analysis and has nothing to do with safety. The grades are A through F, just like a report card.

The letter grades were genius because everybody wants A’s or B’s. But in the Level of Service chart, a D means you’re still getting through an intersection in less than a minute.

An A means there’s nobody around to wait for—no pedestrians, bicyclists, outdoor dining, or window shopping.

As grades slip from C’s to D’s, the transportation department spends millions to build more lanes so drivers don’t have to wait a full minute during rush hour. The intersection is now more dangerous, and any signs of community health wither away.

2. They Insist Car Traffic Will Always Increase, So Their Solution Is More Lanes As if this upside-down grading system wasn’t bad enough, public streets are then engineered for reckless driving. Decades of research show basic decisions like lane width; the number of lanes, bus stops, and benches; and the type of street lighting all influence how people drive. Road engineers’ default design choices are meant for highways, not neighborhood streets—not even the arterials that connect one neighborhood to another.

The design decisions lead to higher speeds, more traffic crashes, and more pedestrians and cyclists hit and killed.

Everything pleasant about a community interferes with the standard transportation analysis and design goals. A street with no delay is a street with no life. It’s unhealthy.

How Planners Block Healthy Living 1. Zoning Rules Dictate Where Development Happens Notoriously, zoning has been used to segregate people by race and class. It was also used as a public health benefit because cities were hotbeds for pollution, filth, and sickness. In the industrial era, mixed-use development brought fears of an early grave.

If a factory were coming to town, the local government would plan to accommodate the new employees and subsequent traffic. But as industries evolved and technology helped clean up cities, land-use rules stayed the same.

Across the country, local development rules require or incentivize development patterns that spread everything across the landscape: work, school, shopping, entertainment, and sleep zones. Then, each category has more prescriptive subcategories. The outcome is that Americans drive everywhere—not just work commutes but the errands before, during, and after work. Half of America’s car trips are less than a few miles long. We’re in a car-first environment because of the zones developed by planners and approved by local leaders.

2. Large-Area Planning Projects Reinforce Segregated Zoning Local governments put together comprehensive plans that cover large areas of land. These projects start with land use but

Andy Boenau at Smart City Expo Miami

then incorporate transportation systems.

Two of the groups blocking healthy infrastructure begin to work in tandem. Plans take shape for more ways to move cars around the zones because the assumption is land uses should be segregated. It goes back to the industrial-era mindset. Networks of wider roads and bigger intersections take shape.

These large-area plans get the attention of the state transportation department, where more planners are drawing maps for road expansions at regional and statewide levels.

3. Small-Area Requirements for New or Infill Projects New and infill development projects are where engineers and their traffic analysis get heavily involved. Local planning departments set the rules for the type of traffic studies that must be performed and the grades they expect to see.

They also set the rules about how much car storage a development has to provide.

The planning profession has worked hard to perfect the process of organized land use that it’s lost sight of the outcomes. Healthy infrastructure violates written and enforced rules at the local level, which brings us to the third group, setting up roadblocks.

How Politicians Block Healthy Living Everything politicians do is influenced in some way by lobbying: the more money,

the more influence. Infrastructure and its adjacent fields are no different. There are two economic powerhouses who know exactly what they want from elected leaders: 1. Transportation (Big Road) Is a TrillionDollar Industry In 2022, they spent $286 million buying policy and power. Two-thirds of those lobbyists are former government employees. The revolving door of employment means it’s in a politician’s best interest to do deals with lobbyists because, pretty soon, that’s where they’ll be. Massive public works projects always get spun as wins for a community. Some are, but most aren’t.

There’s not much profit in walkable infrastructure compared to automotive infrastructure, so it doesn’t bring the same appeal. Big Road wins 3 out of 4 bills they champion. That is an incredible hit rate.

2. Pharmaceuticals (Big Pharma) Is a Trillion-Dollar Industry In 2022, Big Pharma spent $374 million on lobbying, more than any other industry. More than two-thirds of Congress gets donations from Big Pharma. After NBC reported that childhood obesity rates affect nearly 1 in 5 kids, the pharmaceutical industry came up with a solution: weight-loss drugs. 2023 is the first year the American Academy of Pediatrics included anti-obesity drugs in its guidelines.

Being part of a trillion-dollar industry doesn’t make corporations evil, but it does mean their motives should be kept top of mind. These industries prioritize profit, and it’s clear that sick and car-dependent Americans are good for business.

In Contrast to the Junk We’ve Been Given…

Healthy infrastructure is designed to fit who we are as humans. It leads to more social interaction, which improves mental and physical health, which leads to fewer pills sold, which leads to lower profits for Big Pharma.

That same healthy infrastructure makes walking and bicycling convenient, which leads to less dependency on cars, which leads to lower profits for Big Road.

Taking a stand for healthy infrastructure is not in a politician’s best interest if they have their eyes set on a national position.

Are We Doomed?

Only if we ignore who’s setting up roadblocks to healthy infrastructure. I’m giving some examples of how engineers, planners, and politicians play a role because the parts they play are so important. They also tend to blame each other for anything wrong with the built environment. This is fixable at the local level, since so much of it grows out of local land-use policies. Things can get better in the end.

Andy Boenau Storyteller, Urbanism Speakeasy Richmond, Virginia Andy Boenau is a storyteller who simplifies complex material while delivering optimism and hope.

He’s grown a social media following of almost 20,000 along with a 4,000-person email list focused on topics about how to make irresistible places. LinkedIn calls him a “top voice” in transportation planning and ranks him in the top 1% in terms of industry influence. He served as a founding board member of MaaS America, Vice Chair of American Planning Association’s New Urbanism Division, and Chair of the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ Transportation Planning Council. Boenau has won awards for filmmaking, podcasting, writing, and photography. His work is published at UrbanismSpeakeasy.com.

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PARTNERS

PARTICIPANT ORGANIZATIONS Smart City Expo Miami’s Production Team thanks the support of the following organizations and companies whose participation contributed to the success of the event.

PARTNERS

COMMUNITY PARTNERS

MEDIA PARTNERS

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Smart City Miami | 95

TESTIMONIALS

SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES September 18-20, 2023

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I talked about some of the experiences we have around the world of dealing with existing cities, new cities from scratch, and innovations that can help urban experiences. I really enjoy coming here to bounce ideas off of people, see what works, and listen to what didn’t work. And at the end of the day, what comes out are some next steps so we can actually come together again in 2024.

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It was wonderful to meet other speakers and other participants of the conference and realize the diversity of topics discussed and people coming from many different destinations. I got the opportunity during lunch to exchange with a couple of colleagues from Oregon, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv. It was a wonderful experience to be here to discuss and hear similar concerns and problems about our cities and the problems our world is facing.

— EBRU OZER PRINCIPAL , LANDSCAPEDE & PROFESSOR, FIU

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PAUL DOHERTY PRESIDENT & CEO, THE DIGIT GROUP

Bernardo put together an extraordinary lineup of speakers. Each of them has brought a unique perspective to the question of smart cities, sustainability, and the importance of being ready to address the challenges that are in front of us as a society. I’m meeting people from all over the world, as well as all around my own city, and it’s a true pleasure.

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Everybody here is super-focused on results. They’re here because they’re passionate about their communities and innovation.

They want to make their communities smarter and more sustainable. This event does a good job of bringing in people not only locally but also virtually. It’s a very important event, and I’m happy to be here and be part of it.

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MARILYS NEPOMECHIE DISTINGUISHED UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR, FIU SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

JONATHAN REICHENTAL CEO, HUMAN FUTURE

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I’ve been talking to people from all over the world. It’s a wonderful opportunity not just to speak but to network as well. And, of course, we’re in the beautiful city of Miami, which is a wonderful place to be.

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It’s been excellent to be part of the Smart City Expo Miami. It’s not often that we have international conferences like this come to Miami. And when they do, it’s wonderful because you have so many people working together and so many excellent visionaries to get inspiration that we can bring to our cities, especially one like Miami that is facing sea level rise and needs to work past its car-centric infrastructure and create a better place for all.

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BONNIE SCHNEIDER FOUNDER, WEATHER AND WELLNESS

KURT KAMINER SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER, UHEALTH BIKESAFE PROGRAM

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SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES September 18-20, 2023

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The best takeaway from this event is the people and network you create.

You’re able to think about how, by joining forces, we can start to tackle these complex issues. This event takes place in Miami, which is a city with a very interesting relationship to not only contemporary environmental issues but also environmental justice issues. Hopefully, we’re able to expand on some of the speakers’ points and start to think about the relationship between technology and education in this space.

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Smart City Expo Miami is really worthwhile because Bernardo does a great job of pulling together great speakers. Hearing what’s going on, what’s new, and what’s innovative from speakers all over the world is a smart way to run a conference.

Congratulations, Bernardo.

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BIAYNA BOGOSIAN ARCHITECT & PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGY, FIU

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SANDRA BAER CEO, PERSONAL CITIES

I was thrilled to be invited here, and it’s been great to meet people from all over the world, as well as locally here in Miami, to learn about the work they’re doing, both at the academic level and in practice, and to think about the interconnections of all those things working toward making more sustainable and resilient cities.

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It’s been a pleasure to be here at the Smart City Expo Miami. My biggest thrill has been meeting all the other participants and speakers from around the world. It’s really energizing that so many people are interested in promoting the sustainability of cities and also getting their take. It really opened up my mind, thinking about needing to be much more attributing the beauty of nature to our well-being. It was really an excellent meeting.

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ALAN SCOTT DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY, INTERTEK

SARA RUSHINEK PROFESSOR OF BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

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Year after year, Smart City Expo Miami has been a great opportunity to create that kind of community of learning, community of sharing experiences, cross-pollination with top researchers and scientists working in different sectors, industries, and areas. Bernardo has been doing tremendous work for our community, creating this meeting of the minds of international thought leaders from all over the world to share their experiences. We cannot ask for a better opportunity to learn, share, partner, collaborate and create literature, because all these experiences have been published.

— RAIMUNDO RODULFO CIO, CITY OF CORAL GABLES

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Fantastic conference to have so many people coming to Miami from Israel, Austria, Germany, the U.S., and Taiwan. It’s just fantastic because we can all learn from each other.

— THOMAS SPIEGELHALTER PROFESSOR, FIU SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

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TESTIMONIALS

SMART CITY EXPO MIAMI BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES September 18-20, 2023

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I really enjoyed coming to this international event, hearing about other smart city solutions, what’s going on in the industry and the sector, and what’s going on in other places. Because it’s international, we’re able to hear a lot of unique insights from other places, which allows us to break out of our bubble.

Whenever we can see something work somewhere else, it makes us aware of what’s scalable here.

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People are talking about things like how you plan and design a community for human flourishing and sustainability—not just environmental sustainability but also social and financial sustainability. I would highly recommend Smart City Expo Miami.

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JAKE MOSKOWITZ CIO, FRIENDS OF THE UNDERLINE

ANDY BOENAU STORYTELLER, URBANISM SPEAKEASY

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I’m Italian, and I live in Portugal; I came all the way from the other side of the ocean, and I absolutely will continue to bring the smart city experience over there and to expand the awareness of what is important in terms of consciousness to face all the challenges our world is facing at the moment.

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I’m very excited about meeting other speakers and networking with the audience, because I’ve seen many inspirational speakers from different countries and cities around the world. We all have a lot of knowledge that we can share, and I think that transparency is key for success, especially when talking about cities and their development and the implementation of renewable energy and impact solutions. My experience from the audience was amazing.

— INNA BRAVERMAN FOUNDER & CEO, ECO WAVE POWER

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We have people from across the world here. There’s some from Israel, Turkey, Portugal, the islands, and the U.S. So we’re bringing together not just a national but an international presence of expertise working toward bringing smart city technologies together.

— PAMELA HAMBLIN BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER, SELECT POWER SOLUTIONS

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MARTINA FRATTURA HEAD, THE BEAUTY MOVEMENT

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Many of us share common agendas, and we’re learning from each other tactics and approaches that could take our work to the next level. Being a part of this expo gives you wings to fly and helps you not just share what you’ve been learning but also to learn from so many others. The climate crisis is a global issue. The fact that we have this international event based in Miami is amazing because we want everyone to know we’re a microcosm for the future of the entire globe. What people can learn from us here can be replicated everywhere, not just coastal cities but inland cities as well.

— CAROLINE LEWIS FOUNDER & SENIOR ADVISOR, THE CLEO INSTITUTE

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