Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) is an international summit of debate on the link between the urban reality and the technological revolution. Since its first edition in 2011, it has managed to become a global reference event to support the development of cities. This professional, institutional and social meeting point is a leading platform for ideas, networking, experiences and international business that brings together the highest level of stakeholders in urban development.
Due to the contiguity of COVID-19, this year the SCEWC was transformed to give way to the Smart City Live 2020 event, a platform to reconnect and rebuild ecosystems through urban innovation. This virtual forum focuses on the global impact of COVID-19 on cities. As the pandemic has demonstrated that cities are the socioeconomic epicenters of society, it is important to ensure that cities continue to be at the forefront of change and progress as healthy, green, open, safe and livable urban centers. In that framework, Smart City Live brings together businesses, experts, and citizens in a neutral and global forum to share experiences and strategies for cities to accelerate recovery.
On November 16 and 17, Mayor Claudia Lopez and Bogotá's District Chief of Staff, Felipe Jimenez Angel, participated in different forums and meetings of Smart City Live 2020 to discuss the measures implemented in Bogotá used to address the consequences of the crisis by the pandemic in terms of public administration and metropolitan governance.
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On Monday, November 16, the forum began with the meeting of city managers, where the Chief of Staff shared with representatives from Amsterdam, Barcelona and Budapest to share and exchange the measures implemented in their cities for the mitigation of COVID-19 and economic recovery.
During his speech, Angel discussed the quarantine measures that were applied in Bogota and his commitment to citizen culture and reactivation measures such as Bogotá a Cielo Abierto, "The world will remember 2020 as the year where there was more innovation in public management. It will be said that we have been able to innovate in record time and that we are making rapid progress on essential issues due to the urgency of the pandemic".
During the meeting, the common commitment of the cities to sustainable mobility through the promotion of the use of the bicycle, the importance of a gender approach in the decision making process and in facing the economic challenges from a social perspective were highlighted.
In the session held on November 17, Mayor Claudia Lopez talked with representatives from Santiago de Chile and Barcelona about the challenges facing the city in terms of metropolitan governance.
During her intervention, the mayor shared the challenges of articulating regional measures with national ones, "There have been tensions between the local and global levels, not because of political terms but because of the complexity of the issue and jurisdiction".
The mayor highlighted the positive situation for Bogota, "The creation of the metropolitan region of Bogota-Cundinamarca was one of the great miracles of the pandemic. We hope that with this renewal we can coordinate in an institutional way and under a supra-municipal scheme the extension of public policies both of the city and of each of the municipalities that are part of it".
For his part, Antonio Balmón, executive vice president of the Barcelona metropolitan area, told of the opportunities that the pandemic brought, "The national government made decisions that helped our citizens, we had to attack the social problem like the rise in unemployment and poverty. This allowed us to work with people who were alone, who did not have the resources to eat properly, to ensure mobility in order to face something difficult and unprecedented".
Finally, Maria Jesus Vera, Director General of Regional Development and Tourism of the Metropolitan Government of Santiago de Chile, spoke about the joint work that this city has been doing with other metropolises, "Like Bogota and Barcelona, to face challenges like sustainable mobility we had to learn a lot because the pandemic changed the way of working at different levels".
At the end of the event, the moderator thanked all those present for their presence and concluded the conversation by thanking the city of Bogota for sharing its good practices and for its exemplary management in mitigating the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, without neglecting challenges such as sustainable mobility.
