Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Welcome to Smart in the City, the BABLE podcast where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
I am your host Tamlyn Shimizu and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
Smart in the City is brought to you by BABLE Smart Cities. We enable processes from research and strategy development to co creation and implementation. To learn more about us, please visit the BABLE platform at BABLE Smart Cities eu.
I'm live at the Tourism Innovation Summit and I'm sitting down for quick insights with professionals working in the space and seeing how innovation within the tourism space can connect with the work we are doing in urban innovation. This is not our usual format, but I hope you enjoy the change in pace and excuse the background noise as we are on the ground.
[00:01:09] Misa Labarile: Hi, my name is Misa Labarile and I work at the European Commission. The European Commission has one team working on tourism and I'm part of that team. So really excited to be here.
[00:01:19] Daniel Martinez Junquera: My name is Daniel Martinez Junquera. I'm the General Manager of Visit. Gijon is a city in northern Spain, 280,000 people population which we depend on approximately 15% of GDP in total in terms of tourism industry.
[00:01:38] Virginia Borges: I am Virginia Borges. I am the General Director for Tourism and Regional Promotion in La Rioja. La Rioja is a very small region in the north of Spain.
[00:01:48] Miguel Angel Martin Rodriguez: My name is Miguel Angel Martin Rodriguez and I am the Innovation Territorial Innovation Manager of Smart City Cluster.
[00:01:55] Sergio Lopes: I am Sergio Lopes, I'm an advisor for Innovation and Technology for the municipality of Vilanova Malikao and the Smart Cities Project Manager.
[00:02:05] Nina Nesterova: I'm Nina Nesterova, professor of Sustainable Tourism and Transport at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.
[00:02:14] Tamlyn Shimizu: With sustainability becoming increasingly vital, how can smart technologies help reduce the environmental impact of tourism?
[00:02:22] Virginia Borges: By giving us information. By giving us the information we need in order to keep what we have. We are a proudly rural region.
As I told you, it's small not only in the size 5,000 square kilometers, but also small in the population 300,000 inhabitants and 174 municipalities, which means we have like many municipalities, like with 50, 100 people, 2,000 people.
So there's this challenge of keeping it alive. And for that we need the data to tell us what's happening in the environment, to tell us what's happening with the visitors coming to us to tell us what's happening in the Region as at all.
[00:03:16] Misa Labarile: Yeah, sustainability is a concern and for the past three years, just on tourism, we worked a lot to support destinations and business become more sustainable. But for us, sustainability means a lot. It's not just becoming more green, greener, you know, but it's also about becoming more inclusive and making sure that the residents are involved. There's a lot that goes into sustainability for us at European level and we're happy to report that we have all of the governments of the European Union on board. We've got a European agenda for this and we all agree there's a lot more to sustainability to just becoming green. Having said that, and in answer to your question, we've seen quite a lot of best practices going around and they have to do with a number of different things. So we've seen how the use of technology can help a destination become greener. So for example, Valencia, who was European Capital Smart Tourism 2022, Valencia has set up, and I think it's the first city in the world to do it, a whole system to measure and to certify the carbon footprint of tourists. That's a big deal because through data they can actually assess where that carbon footprint is produced by tourists when they arrive. And it can be either in food consumptions on transport. I believe it's more transport than food consumptions. But you see, it's super helpful because that way they can make measure it and I can intervene on it. So there's a way that you can become more sustainable through technology and mostly goes through data because then you can get information and you can act upon it. But because for us, sustainable it's so much more than that and it has to do with how we all as an ecosystem behave in a destination.
Then we've also seen examples of how you can change tourists tourist behaviors and that's smart. It's not technology driven, but it's very smart. So I will mention this, and not even a week ago, I think Copenhagen came to Brussels to present that example of what they're doing with wonderful Copenhagen to our stakeholders ecosystem. And I think they got an excellent feedback. People loved it just because it's such a simple idea and it works. And I don't see why it shouldn't inspire others to do it. So what it is, what it is about is about getting tourists to behave in a certain way and reward them for that. It's about cycling rather than driving, picking up the trash rather than, you know, hanging out at Starbucks. It could be anything. But the point is good practices get a reward and that really helps.
[00:05:49] Nina Nesterova: I think this is really important and actually fundamental question because we need to make sure that we are not developing technologies for the sake of technologies, but we are developing technologies with a bigger goal behind it. And of course we are living in the age of disruptions where climate disruption is one of the biggest. And actually it's really putting into the question the whole future of our planet and of individual destinations. So I think that's one of the biggest fundamental societal goals that we need to address with the development of the technologies.
So if we look at the smart destinations, smart cities or smart regions, or smart tourist destinations at this moment, really all struggling with balancing the positive sides of tourism with its negative consequences, such as high carbon footprints of the tourism trips, also with impact on the residents with increasing living prices and other challenges. So technologists really need to make sure that they help us with taking evidence based decisions at destinations and that they are able, they help us to translate all that we know within the science about how to make more sustainable decisions for smart cities, for smart destinations. But they help us to translate it into the actionable strategies that destinations can act upon. And when we speak about it specifically, it's important to look at the trip to and from the destinations. Because at this moment, trip to and from destinations, it's actually 70 to 80% of carbon footprint emission of the whole tourism experiences. So we need to make sure that people travel less far, that we are reducing our travel distances. Because by doing this we directly decrease the sustainable the carbon footprint of the whole tourism trip. And also we create more opportunities for integration of sustainable travel modes. Because then we provide opportunities to come to destination with a train, to come to destination with electric car, or even by cycling as one of the most healthiest travel modes. So as soon as we have technologies who are helping us and guiding us and facilitating us to travel shorter and travel more sustainably, I think that really helps to the whole environmental situation around the tourism trip.
[00:08:46] Tamlyn Shimizu: As you can hear very insightful comments from some of the experts here at the Tourism Innovation Summit. Which brings us to our next question.
What role does data play in improving the way cities and regions manage tourism and how is that data typically gathered and used? Data is vastly shaping how we are managing tourism and making informed decisions in government. Let's have a listen to some insights from our guests working on these topics.
[00:09:12] Sergio Lopes: Well, in my view, the future of data gathering, which lead us obviously to the algorithms of data mining, data science and AI. Also it holds the promise of creating highly efficient urban experience for both tourists and residents.
Because by integrating AI to the infrastructures, to the real time sensors that we have around the city, we unlock the potential for personalized experience and real time responsiveness and effectiveness on the experiences. So that's the first thing.
What about the data per se?
I envision building a smart city. We also focus on data. And we aren't talking always about gathering data, data, data, data, but just because it's a strategy that is really, really important. If you can envision and go with me closing your eyes and envision strategic pyramids of data where the base is data.
And if we refine and analyze that data, that data evolves into information which provide us insights and analytic capabilities.
But if you think so, information alone doesn't give you the proper power to make changes and make good decisions. So you have to further derive from information to get knowledge. And knowledge allows you to have a predictive foresight. With the predictive foresight, you can start predicting scenarios, you can start to anticipate things that are happening and you can response effectively and change the people's lives. But even knowledge alone doesn't give you the final power to the persons who make decisions need. That only gives you finally from knowledge, when we obtain wisdom, that's the final top of the pyramid. And with wisdom you enable prescriptive actions for guiding smarter and more sustainable cities. Because the wisdom is all combined together, all the steps that data can give you to manage to build a roadmap, build a smart city that fully integrated all the Idea League projects. The today in our panel I use an example of the digital twins that are the perfect example that you can have in the top of the pyramid of the data. Because you build a model real time, responsive, with all the data that you have, and with all the data you can build a digital model to predict and build models of what will happen if you make that change. For example, if you build a school in that street, what impact will have on the traffic, what impact will have on the movement of people and in the parks they visit and when they left school, what impact will have in the economy, what business will born and what business will die in there? So all of this is really important information that you need. Not that people can adapt to the new realities, but be prepared for the new realities. And that's really most important thing.
And to finalize what you asked me about how we gather data, and nowadays, because we live in a data powered world, it's actually pretty easy, but also very efficiently because you have analytics and you have alarmistics, we Gather a lot of them due to new kind of algorithms, AI with feed video, we have surveillance cameras that do not capture the feed. It's important to say that so people don't get alarmed and we don't lose our privacy. And that is always regulated by the policies of European Union, thank God. But we use that algorithms to manage to track the flux of people. We have already in our city. We have a beta project of 22 cameras and we are building more 40 of them just to monitor the one analytics that can give us the flux of people statistics they can analyze. They are elderly, if they are adult, if they are children, they are teenagers. And what type of flux they go, where they go, how they go to try to make patterns of what the city needs, what they need, what they want. That's number one. And also the alarmistic. Alarmistic is really important. When you see law enforcements, when you see surveillance cabinets with the public safety, or also, for example, in the mall or in a prison, for example, when you have a lot of cameras analyzing, sometimes you have one policeman to look at 200 cameras. And that's humanly impossible. But with the AI, you can have alarmistic algorithms that can predict some scenarios that you anticipate. Like things that can happen in a city like crash, like public agitation, like many people doing robberies or things like that in the future. Is that what we are driving and going?
And the last thing is that we connect to a lot of APIs in our city. For example, one example of data that we gather is satellites of Copernicus from European space program and from NASA. The firms that give us two types of things, different, but always the same type of data is that we have those satellites crossing our territory like 20, 24 times a day, taking photograms real time, giving us the data of impermeableization of the soils. We can see how the soils are in terms of humidity, of drainage of water. We can see with the firms from NASA, we can see the columns of smoke, that smoke is a fire or not. That is real time alarmistic that they are saying to us, go check it out, because that's really big smoke. So we are the human side of this is always necessary for us to implement response and implement the tasks and implement the ways that we can fix the problems. But these tools will help us to get a better understanding of our territory, of our persons, of our people. But never losing sight of the personalized experience since and just to be short, so be quick in tourism sector that we are talking about, it is really Important that we with a lot of these tools that we use and we build, we never lose sight of track of what are the richness of culture that we have, the patrimony that we have, the historical landmarks that we have and never lose them.
I come from a country and I proudly say this, and I believe our Nues Rosa hermanos from Spain always say the same too. We proudly preserve what we have. It's cultural. Because we are a country with 900 years old, with the same borders, the same neighbors, and we protect the heritage that we have.
We still have in Portugal, the aqueducts of Romans, and we protect them and we preserve them. Has historical monuments and not being damaged by tech and overflow of this. So it's really important the data, but it's really important that we don't lose track of the people's needs and what the richness of our cultural and patrimony that we have.
[00:18:12] Miguel Angel Martin Rodriguez: Data is a world that now is inside our lives. When I talk with.
It's very strange that you don't talk with a municipality or with an IT company that don't talk you about I want artificial intelligence, I want to have big data. Sometimes my answer to that is, okay, you don't need big data. You need data at the beginning because you are controlling right now your tourisms in a very old way. That could be okay and you don't need more. But we need to concentrate that I visit municipalities, that their control of visitors is the statistics that they have from their website, our WordPress website, and the people that is attending to the local to they use an Excel or a paper that did put one people from Germany, a couple of Russians, whatever, and they put that in Excel. I told them, okay, big data has no sense for you right now. You have no data and you cannot explode nothing. The you don't need AI, you need to normalize your data, know which data you want to know. Because if you have a challenge, that is, for example, I want to define or redefine the target of my visitors. Okay, let's go to the data that can bring us that not only when they are here, that we can use a lot of technologies to know by their mobile, whatever, where they are from, extract information about how they are visiting you, why they have seen you in your website. They are using their social network. Make a social network analysis. This is one of the data that most of the towns are doing right now, basically for smart tourism. I think the principle of data that we can manage right now is the data that allow us to evaluate Our visitors in three steps. One is the pre visit people that is looking for example in website for search for flights, for search for hotels, for search for airbnbs or other kind of apartments. People that is stay now in our town, they have arrived to our town and they are doing things around. We need to do what they are doing and after that we need the feedback. How was their experience? They was happy, they was not happy.
The town covered the expectation that they have or not always controlling the red line of the privacy and control this in an anonymous way.
[00:20:47] Virginia Borges: Well, we are right now developing our systems. When I say right now we are aiming at getting like a big collecting system for our region.
It has been launched this week.
So what we are trying to do with this system which is called the intelligence tourism system.
Yes. Is to gather all possible information. Okay. We are going to buy data from third sources but also we are going to get data from our own hotels and also not only from our tourism sector, but also to gather data from other systems like weather camps or maybe like parking camps. So just to know what kind of tourists are coming to the destination, what are they doing?
[00:21:48] Daniel Martinez Junquera: To be totally honest, I've been working as a general manager of Visiting Home for the past four years only.
I was working before my whole career in hospitality industry. I've been managing hotels well, not my whole life, but the past seven years.
And we always as.
As managing hotels we always use data to try to perform better and better the way we serve our customers. So I try to apply that on my daily basis as a destination, as a general manager of destination management Office.
So the first thing that I asked when I arrived to the office, when I became general manager of Visit Home, I was asking okay guys, we are going to launch a new promotion campaign. When are we going to say when are we going to launch that campaign? And they say okay, we think that we might do it on March, we think we might do it on April, is when the people is thinking about on booking their holidays. And I say how do you know that? Because we usually do it that way.
So we started to think about how the data can impact on our daily basis decisions in terms of promoting, in terms of managing the office, in terms of giving data to all local companies as well for them to be able to get a better strategic decisions and performance on their daily basis.
We got a couple of examples that we are very proud of which is we we got in a program within all the accommodation companies in the in our city, which is approximately 32 hotels, hotels and other kind of accommodations where they provide us with all the information regarding the occupation, the occupancy that they have on daily basis, the ADR and the RevPAR that they have. We got a 90 days forecast of what they have on their books.
We mix all that together and we get them back to them. So imagine that you have 30 hotels that they provide you individually, which is data, and you get all the information together and you send it back for them on how the city is doing in terms of performing, in terms of the forecast that they have on occupancy on adr.
That will give them a better use of data in terms of performing much better. And for us it will give us a very precise statistic of what is going on in our city.
That is one of the examples that we have made with the local companies in the city. It's very important as well as we discussed before in terms of preserving the local community to know exactly what is going on in the city, to see and to check how many tourists are visiting one touristic attraction, where are they moving, where are the peak points on, you know, on museums and try to avoid the amount of people that can fit in in one attraction. So it's very important for us to try to monetize all that data and then give it to the local attractions to see if they can perform better as well. So I would say the data is very important in general, the investing on technology to gather that data for us to perform better, for us to try to achieve our strategic points, our final goals, to be a better destination.
[00:25:37] Misa Labarile: Well, I'm a big fan of data, so I could talk about this for hours on end and I won't. But listen, data is always a little bit scary as a word.
People get a bit taken aback when we talk about data. But really, let's just demystify that it's information. And information is everything to me, data is, information is key, it is where we need to invest and it also is the new gold for the future. I mean, if you just think about AI that works on data, doesn't it? You wouldn't have an AI solution if you didn't have data flowing around and obviously algorithms to make it work. But point is, we want, for the eu, we want a single market for data. That means that we want data to go around as water does. When you wash your face in the morning and you open the tab and water comes off, you don't ask where the water comes from, you don't, you don't even ask questions. When you plug in Your phone and it charges. You're not asking yourself where the energy comes from. It's an asset. We want data to be that kind of asset. We want a destination or a small business or a big business to go somewhere, an app or a platform that will allow them to have access to this kind of information. The information that they need, whatever it is that they need for whatever it is that they want to do. That is our ambition. That's our main project that we're working on. It's got a very technical name. It's called Data Space for Tourism. Everybody hates it. It's not very clear, but really what it does, it's just we want a mechanism. The IU level will allow information to go to flow through sectors, through borders. That's what we're very, very qualified to set up and what we're trying to do.
[00:27:16] Tamlyn Shimizu: Some very interesting insights from our guests. Now let's dive into another really interesting topic.
How do you envision emerging tech like AR or VR shaping the future of urban tourism?
[00:27:30] Sergio Lopes: I believe that in the last topic I was talking about, kindly address this because this is a good example, the augmented reality and the virtual reality of what can endanger our human experience, of the product that we want, this real tourism and genuine good tourism that we have. I'm going to give you an example from our city.
We have a museum in my city that is from where a famous writer that we have in Portugal used to live and shot himself. He was a novelist. So tragic ending for a tragic writer. It's really poetic and romantic and it's really search for people. Who wants to see the house where these novelists were living.
They asked me and my team to build tech, innovative innovation, tech for visiting the museum. They wanted to film 360 degrees cameras and we built the virtual reality of the museum.
We kindly did that. But the result was not what we expected. The result is what it is is someone put the goggles and it's in Beijing or is in Tokyo or is whatever and pick this app online and go see the house of the famous writer where he lived. But can he smell the environment? Can he feel the vibe where that poor man wrote the most amazing and beautiful stories and when he where the place where he shot himself tragically because he was blind and couldn't write anymore. So I believe that in this case it's just an example. I wanted to give you that the idea of having a VR that is going to make our public more passionate about that I believe not because it's not the same it's different. Seeing the reality, going to the place, feeling it, feeling the vibe, feeling the atmosphere of one thing that was historical. And in the comfort of your home, seeing the thing, it doesn't feel real. And that is the key word in this. Augmented reality and virtual reality are excellent tools for us to make predictions for us to make models. As I was talking about before about the digital twins, they are perfect for making models, but they are not perfect for substituting the experience.
And that is a path that we should not go when we are talking about tourism, because tourism is not staying in your couch. Visiting stuff is actually going there.
[00:30:35] Miguel Angel Martin Rodriguez: Okay, I think these two technologies are very usable inside the smart touring destination or the smart cities in general. In fact, in every part of the city they allow us to make able people that have some disadvantages. For example, in here or go to any places. Imagine somebody that is riding in a wheelchair and can have access to an ancient heritage, part of a theater of another place that is very difficult to access, maybe mountains, maybe in a lake. We can prepare that these people, maybe it's not in the place because you know, there are augmented reality and virtual reality system that only works when you are in a GPS coordinator or in an area of allocation. But in these two situations, they can bring up what they should see in locally. They are doing it remotely, maybe seated in front of his smart TV or using their phone or a tablet, or being in the low part of a mountain and see what is what is in the top or what is the monument that is behind this part of a very difficult road to access with a wheelchair. And they can access to this information. The same for people that had disadvantages in their vision or heating. They can access to information that maybe they cannot access with standard technologies, not only apply it to VR or ar, other technologies or the combination of them are making the ability to make these people be near the things that in years ago could be impossible to access.
[00:32:20] Tamlyn Shimizu: Now let's move on to another pressing issue when it comes to smart tourism.
With funding being a critical part of development, what funding models or sources have been effective in smart city tourism projects? Let's learn from some of our guests.
[00:32:36] Nina Nesterova: For sustainable smart cities, funding is really critical because unfortunately still at this moment we see sustainability as a cost. We do not see sustainability as an opportunity for future business model, for future development, but again, we still see it as a cost. So we really need to have funding mechanism to support sustainability projects. And I really do hope for a future where we are working more and more on the business Models like really use it in positive sides of sustainable development and making those sites profitable and beneficial to local communities in the long term and actually bringing back the real value of tourism, real value of travel to the destinations.
[00:33:34] Sergio Lopes: Yeah, that's a tricky one.
But it's really important question because.
[00:33:42] Miguel Angel Martin Rodriguez: We.
[00:33:42] Sergio Lopes: Got to understand that funding about tourism sector is divided about what is public investment and what is private investment.
And they really need to come together always and be the motor that drives together and both ways. Because if you only put the funding on the side of private vision, you only have products that care more about the statistics, the data driving of what about consume and what is the product that people want to consume and not about the experience and not about the feeling that each experience bring us.
And also the public side. Because each administration of public services needs to protect and uphold and try to make a good marketing of what they have good. So this is like then a good rivalry between many destinations that we have. Each one is different because each one has its own unique richness. If they were not unique, they were not a destination.
So that gives us that when you talk about funding, you need to get public and private together in one zone.
[00:35:10] Miguel Angel Martin Rodriguez: Okay. Basically my experience working with Spanish territories and areas during last years before COVID we have a lot of funds coming from next generation funds from Europe.
We have a lot of money. The thing that I want to remark here is I'm not 7% agree how these phones can be used. Sometimes we have mostly true errors I think that could be reviewed in the future for future phones. Sometimes governments or high level European commissions have defined it what needs to be found, what concepts, what developments, for example, ar, VR, totems, websites, QR codes. That was the most developed thing after Covid. Covid has the powerful that had discovered QR codes for all the people. And then we have found things that maybe we haven't asked to our towns or to our municipalities, or maybe to our countries. Because I have worked in distinct segments and distinct countries and I know that the phones that you need to develop or the concepts that you need to develop in Germany are not the same that you need to develop in Spain. And instead of SP inside the Spain, sorry, you don't need to develop the same phones or the same concept inside an interior area. With tourism based on natural areas, mountains, lakes, rural life or a smart village that you need to found in a. In a place that is doing a seasonally touring with beach, happy, happy life around the summer maybe.
I talk a lot with this association that please, when you are Going to prepare a round of funds, ask the people what they need. Because when I'm doing right now a lot of technical diagnosis or analysis to situation, I discovered that the same areas has the same install and they are not using anymore. Because in the moment that they get that, yeah, they install, you ask them what do you have a totem in the middle of the main square of your town? Because was free by phone in this moment. But I don't really did not say, okay, you have a technology of €50,000 that you are not using anymore because you don't need it. But at this moment was the phone that was available. And I need to invest in something to put my terms in power. I think the first problem was that the phones are okay, but we need to redefine a bit the mobile. And the other way is the no capacity sometimes of our local administrations to execute or make the execution of these phones. Big cities in Spain like Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia are very able to do that. They have a lot of public employees working in this project and they are able to prepare, go through tenders, prepare the projects, execute the projects and justify them. The problem is we In Spain, approximately 65% of our towns has less than 20,000 inhabitants. This means when we are working with a local community, a local government, maybe there are only three, four councils working and three, four, in the best of the cases, techniques or public personnel work employees inside. The problem is when they get 1 million euro money that they have never been managing, because their budgets are very reduced, they are not able. And at the end we get the worst news that only 35% of the public funds of European next generation funds have been executed. There's no problem of the funds, there's no problem of the knowledge, there's no problem of the projects. Is the problem that. The problem mostly is that these small towns or missile towns have no capacity to process these budgets.
[00:39:07] Misa Labarile: Yeah, funding is so important and to be honest, there isn't enough of a national level, regional level, not even a European level.
We all wish we had more funding. And now we want the single market to become more competitive, we want to invest. So it all comes back to how much money you can put in. So I agree.
And we do work with like, obviously we have EU fundings available for tourism and we always try to to allocate according to our priorities. Our priorities are digital tourism, sustainable tourism and accessible tourism. So that's what we do. But at the same time it's not. I don't think that it is just about how much Money you put in, it's how you use that money. Our best, our champions, the destinations are doing best that we try to avoid through, you know, several initiatives. What we notice is what they really do is they coordinate internally a lot. So they put forward a great, a great model of governance whereby it's not just the tourism board deciding how that money is spent, but there's a lot of other departments coming in. Mobility, you know, involved with the residents. It's another one, social work, in a way, because accessibility is an important aspect of this. But even energy costs have a. Have a way of sneaking into how you manage your tourism offer. So all of the departments that manage a city, you know, we have to go into this, which can make it very complicated. But I think money is well spent when you have a strategy that involves everybody. And that's just my hunch, but that's what we seen happening in the cities that eventually run up to become European capitals or smart tourism.
[00:40:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: And after all these insights, let's move on to the last topic of today.
How can smart cities create a balance between catering to tourists and preserving quality of life for local residents? Our guests have some thoughts about this balance and looking after the citizen quality of life.
[00:41:07] Daniel Martinez Junquera: It is a very important topic for us in our city and in my personal opinion, as a professional in tourism for many, many, many years, tourism now is, I would say, suffering. It's in terms of the way the people is seeing tourism.
We cannot forget that it has to be a balance between visitors coming to our cities and living with the local communities in the cities.
I would say that we don't have tourists coming to our cities. We have like, you know, daily citizens that they come and visit and enjoy the cities that they are trying to stay in.
Smart tourism destinations. At the end of the day, what they are trying to, to put is.
[00:42:01] Miguel Angel Martin Rodriguez: The.
[00:42:05] Daniel Martinez Junquera: Idea of how the two communities and tourists can merge together and they can survive.
If we go back like, let's say three, four decades ago, where we, to be honest, the people working on demos or, or in national government or even private companies as well, we just care about how many tourists we have on the year around. We didn't care about any other things like how much they impact on the, on the, on the destinations, how much water they consume on daily basis, how much carbon emissions they.
The impact on the whole world. So it is a fact of, okay, we just have to stop and think, what's the model of tourism that we want to deploy on our destinations on our countries? And then the angular point of the growing of tourism must be the local communities. It has to be respected.
They need to be, let's say they have to be combined about what's the more attractive points of a destination. It has to be their own citizens. It has to be what they do on their daily basis, the activities they practice. And we cannot make our cities being a theme park and hope that everything is going to be fine. We need to invest on, on preserving the identity of the local communities and try to boost, boost that as probably the most attractive element point of promoting a city.
[00:43:57] Virginia Borges: Yes, and also an important topic because I think we need to make like a shift of our. On the way we see it, it's like when you ride a bicycle that where you put your eyes on is where you're heading at. So I think you have to put your eyes on the citizens. I mean, as a government, I'm well aware of the fact that my resources come from the taxes from my residents.
So my citizens are the most important stakeholder when thinking about tourism. So I think this is, this is one point that has not always been like this, that citizens have been sort of forgotten when thinking about tourism.
So for me, the way is, as I already told you, to think about them, to consider them. And I think also when you think about the residents, you're making a better tourism offer a better tourism experience. Because when you keep your destination like safe or well taken care of, it's also a better experience and a more authentic one for the ones coming to visit us.
For too long when thinking about tourism management, we have been only thinking about tourists.
So as a government, you can not only think about tourists, you have to think about the residents as well. About. No, we are civil servants, so we have to serve our citizens when considering that.
This means that in our case in a region, you have to think about all the majors. I mean, tourism takes place in all these small towns and villages with majors that maybe don't have any information or any training on tourism or any studies on tourism. So we have to help them build the type of tourism they want and the type of tourism that is going to bring welfare to the population.
[00:46:03] Tamlyn Shimizu: And finally, it's a question we ask every single guest on the podcast. To you what is a smart city?
[00:46:11] Misa Labarile: That is a very easy question for me because we do have a European capital, smart tourism. There you go. I'm just going to tell you what it is.
So to me, a smart destination or what we call a European capital, smart tourism.
It's a city or a destination that has got a Very strong sustainability agenda, is very well aware of the potential use of technology and innovation puts them together to create a tourism offer that is accessible to all, but also that does not distort who you are, preserves your identity. And that's why we have these four axes that go in, that go in it's cultural heritage. The way you promote it. Accessibility, the way you make sure that everyone can come to you. Innovation and digital. The way you make sure that technology is Portuguese and obviously sustainability, the way we make sure that your destination can be preserved in time.
[00:47:02] Daniel Martinez Junquera: As I told you before, I mean a smart cities, you know, this merge of things, of technology, innovation, sustainability, accessibility and also the how we perform in public administration in terms of, of mixing all together all the old ingredients to have the perfect recipe, you know, to try to preserve. I mean to put in the front that tourism is one of the most important industries in the whole world.
That it creates thousands of employments all over the year.
That we try to, you know, to. To get a smile from the person that we have in front of us when they are enjoying their. Their visit, their trip or their. Yeah, their trip to, to our city. But we have to bear always in. In mind that that cannot be ahead on, on the local community desires as well. We cannot sell our soul to tourism.
We should work very closely with the local communities to be very smart to try to see what their local community seeks and what tourism tourists seeks and mixing together. For me, that is the way of being smart. The rest are tools, technology or being innovative or obviously you have to. To think about sustainability or accessibility. But everything are tools to try to be the perfect destination in terms of that holistic way of tourism.
[00:48:49] Misa Labarile: Okay.
[00:48:50] Virginia Borges: For me a smart city is the one that taking into account with the goal of taking care of our citizens is using the best technologies, the state of the art technology to help them live the way they want to live, have a good quality of life and also create great experiences for tourists.
[00:49:18] Sergio Lopes: What is for me smart city? Okay, I usually give this example when I start working in Smart Cities project as I'm a computer geek and a computer science engineer.
I think all the times that in the beginning of my environment in Smart City, I was thinking about technology and sensors and new ways, new innovations. But as I cross along the Smart Cities project, I came to discover that is nothing about what I was thinking initially. It's not about the technology, it's about centering on people. And when people ask me what do you think about smart cities?
In the old days I used to say It's a technological process. But now, I don't say now, I say it's a management process because it is a management process. Smart thinking, Smart City. It's a management process because you have to make a goal that is focused on people.
And technology is merely a tool, just that, nothing more.
And also there's a strong component that you need to think about. Smart Cities that I never was imagining I was building those types of programs and how I do, and I love them, is about place making.
And I give you a good example. When we make renovations in our city and we built our city, built a really brand new marketplace in our city, the first idea was not, thank God, because if it was me in charge, it will be. It was not put everything digital and everything with monitors and panels. No, it was about making comfort for people, making a place of gathering and not losing the traditional feel. The feeling that you go to the market and you see the old peoples that are there long decades, selling the meat, selling the flowers. There are no supermarket brandings, everything is fresh. And also the placemaking where people know that, for example, the special program that we have is really cool, is people that are retired and has a craft, for example, being a blacksmith or being old crafts that actually nowadays are no longer practical, unfortunately, but they can transmit that knowledge.
And the other day was really wonderful to see that one kid that has a problem in his house, a problem in the. In his sink, it was just flooded.
He didn't call anyone to come there. He learned how to do it, he learned how to repair it because he had the insight of a community that shares their knowledge and share their experience. So to summarize all things nowadays, I'm happy to say that what I feel about Smart City is not tech, it's about people, their experience, their demands and their needs. And that is wonderful to see. And that is what I envision for the future.
[00:52:50] Nina Nesterova: Smart City is a destination that is able to balance negative consequences of tourism with its positive sites. And that is really using technologies for the bigger goal, to facilitate cooperation between different institutions for the bigger societal goal, such as sustainable development of the city. And Smart City is a city that prioritizes environmental values residents to the economic profits of individual industries.
[00:53:37] Miguel Angel Martin Rodriguez: It's a city that is trying to learn how to be intelligent. I think when we establish the English name of smart, Smart had this distinct translations that could be, yeah, intelligent or curious. Or I think our thesis right now, without three, four big cities are curious and are trying to learn what is to be an intelligent city.
[00:54:04] Tamlyn Shimizu: And to all of our listeners. Don't forget, you can always create a free account on Babo Smart Cities eu. You can find out more about projects, solutions, implementations. So thank you very much.
Thank you all for listening. I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
