What will we learn at Smart Cities Week in the Silicon Valley?

It’s the epicentre of the tech industry, where it all seems to happen … Silicon Valley … and I’m looking forward to heading there this month to attend the 2017 Smart Cities Week (8-10 May, 2017), organised by the Smart Cities Council.

The Smart Cities agenda continues to grow in importance across the globe and the program for this event promises to help us all prepare for what may be just around the corner. I am excited to hear some pretty impressive speakers across sessions including the ‘Smart Cities Readiness Workshop’, ‘Smart Transportation’ and ‘How to Prepare Your City for Self Driving Cars.’

While the overall focus on the conference is ‘what’s next’ for smart cities in terms of incoming trends and disruptive technologies, I do wonder (and hope) what focus and learnings there will be in terms of how PEOPLE fit into the smart cities picture. It’s all good and well to be using technology to create smart cities, but how do we make sure that the smart cities we are creating are actually providing positive benefits for the people, and not creating more problems, or new ones that didn’t exist before… more on this in an upcoming article I’ve penned.

I will be posting videos and regular tweets and LinkedIn updates using the following hashtags: #SCWSV and #SCI  (Swinburne University Smart Cities Institute) and #smartcities so please join me online during the event.