Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] 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.
[00:00:21] Tamlyn Shimizu: I am your host, TamlynShimizu and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
[00:00:31] Tamlyn Shimizu: 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-smartcities eu.
[00:00:47] Tamlyn Shimizu: So today we are coming back for our Imagine series where we are diving into the upcoming themes of the event held in Tampere, Finland on the 27th and 28th of May. As part of the event, we're featuring cities who will be speaking, speaking as part of the Imagine the citiverse challenge. And they get the opportunity to present a current and relevant challenge within their city. And companies will pitch their solutions for that challenge. So definitely not something to be missed. I highly encourage you to make your way up to Finland. I don't think you need too much encouragement to go to Finland. It sounds pretty cool. But I want to encourage you also for this benefit of getting to hear some amazing cities speak and companies that can actually address those challenges.
To give you an idea of who will be on the stage and the topics that will be presented now, I need you to introduce you to the following guests of today's episode. First off, of course I have the lovely Roland van der Heyden. He's the program manager of the Rotterdam citiverse. Welcome, Roland.
[00:01:48] Roland van der Heijden : Thank you. Welcome.
Nice to be here.
[00:01:52] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, lovely to have you. We've been talking for such a long time. I actually thought we had already done a podcast episode together, but we haven't. So I'm really glad to find finally sit down with you and with him today I also have another really wonderful guest. I have Alfredo Viglienzoni. He's the ICT expert for the municipality of Genova, Italy. Welcome, Alfredo.
[00:02:14] Alfredo Viglienzoni: Thank you. Hi everybody.
[00:02:17] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yes, lovely to have you as well.
So I always start off this episode with a bit of a teaser question. Getting warmed up for the main interview and the teaser question I have for you today is. Yeah, a little play on words. So imagine you have one superpower to enhance your work. What would it be and why?
Alfredo, you want to start?
[00:02:44] Alfredo Viglienzoni: Sure. Wisdom. I think wisdom is extremely important to guide us in complex times where fundamental do right choices for people.
And my challenge you'll hear is all about not leaving anybody behind and, you know, in a moment in which everybody is getting a full ict, you know, everybody's ruled by my technology.
We need to ensure nobody's left behind.
[00:03:26] Tamlyn Shimizu: So wisdom, that's a good one. I don't know if I've ever had anyone say that, but I like it. Roland, what's your superpower now?
[00:03:34] Roland van der Heijden : It's a bit connecting on the last things. Alfredo was saying to be able to make meaningful and trustworthy connections, to create connections, to build up networks together. And in that networks, leave nobody behind because we all have the tendency to work on our own things, but we forget that we are living in a society and need to work together. So look over your own walls, what's going out there and try to make. To connect to that world outside.
[00:04:10] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very noble superpowers, I would say. No invisibility cloak or flying or teleportation.
No Good.
I want to learn a little bit more about both of you as people. Your journey to where you are today. That's always really interesting to get to know you more. Roland, maybe you can start telling us about your background and what led you to your role today.
[00:04:40] Roland van der Heijden : A bit of my background, I'm from Origin, a city planner. And I've also worked in that field as a city planner. And now the words that we use today, I would say in the. What you say, the social, physical world, and I'm mainly on the physical side of it, they're trying to build up that physical city in all kind of forms, from housing up until sustainability, et cetera.
But at some point, let's say I put it other words, I have always had a fascination also for data and digital in that. But it was at that time very little and low, especially in the profession that I was working in.
But at some point in my working career, we saw that more and more a digital city was arising.
And when we saw that city arising, then the first question was, okay, what is that then a digital city? And how does that relate to the social, physical city, the traditional city as we know it, and what does it do with the challenges that we then face as a city? How will they be changed by digital, the digital realm? And the third question that popped up was, okay, but what's our role in that as a government? And nowadays it's mainly less a discussion. But back then it was really a discussion because everybody was saying, within my organization at least, whoa. But digital, let's ease that up to the big tech. They know what they're talking about. We as government don't know that. So let's leave it up there.
And nowadays, seeing what's happening, maybe we think different, but back then it was real, in our opinion, a real important question that nobody was asking those three questions together. They were the basis for a new program and that was the Digital City program that we developed as Rotterdam. And that's a program that I've run for the last six years in which we tried to answer those questions. We developed a vision on that we call that Rotterdam Transformation.
And we also developed what we now call a piece of digital infrastructure for that city in which we try to have a governance around that infrastructure that we as a public and private combination, private partnership have developed in which we try as a government, take the roll up to make that whole digital infrastructure a responsible and trustful one in which we can maintain our public values. Now, having done that program, now we're at the brink of a new journey that we're starting and that's what we call Rotterdam City verse. And that will be more about what's next. If we see that world going to change in a world in which people are going to move fluidly from a completely digital world to a completely physical world and every hybrid form in between, what kind of city and what kind of citizen will that be. So that rises a new bunch of questions and that's what we try to answer in our new program, Rotterdam citiverse.
[00:07:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really interesting background and journey also with Rotterdam through these different programs. I'm really excited also to see what citiverse holds for you, Alfredo. I would love to hear a lot more about you. Actually this is my first time meeting you, so I really have very little background. Please, please tell me about yourself and all of the work that you do.
[00:08:08] Alfredo Viglienzoni: So I am a physicist by background and spent time at CERN doing particle physics when I was younger, then spent a lot of time abroad in the United States, uk, Sweden.
I spent initial first part of my career in private companies working on medical products, own about 21 patents in medical medical technologies and then moved into telecom where I managed while I was in Stockholm an Almost a little bit 1 billion and a half business unit for a telecom company with sales worldwide sales, then had my own company in the United States and then moved back in Italy to work in the Geneva municipality. Thanks to the friendship and interest of mayor of the City, I started working with him back I don't say the year because it is a long time ago though.
And then here in Genova I have been the basically the chief operating officer and the city manager.
It is a 5,000 people organization plus about 15,000 people in all your own companies.
And here I focused a lot on improving the ICT in the city. First of all, restructuring the information system.
We had about about 210 vertical applications like taxis, police, schools, and I ensure the interoperability among them.
And we created a platform which is called Fascicola del Cittadino, where you with a single login can actually deal with all your applications and you have to do with the municipality and government. So you can enroll your school's kids to school, verify what they eat at lunch, books in the library, or you know, buy your tickets for theaters or buses, all this stuff.
And then now we are restructuring even further the the ICT part of our infrastructure for the municipality, moving to a full data lake. And this allows us to develop a lot of vertical applications in a much simpler and effective way.
As part of all this work, Genova has been awarded in 2024 as the most digital city in Italy.
We have 87% of the municipality fully digitized. In is not only a front office matter, it's also the full back office. Up to everything gets back into a front office with the citizen.
And this has been a major result because this means that the true infrastructure of the municipality is now working in a much proper digital manner.
[00:11:57] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very interesting as well. I'm really excited to learn more. So, Roland, before we get into kind of the challenges and the challenge aspect that we're going to talk about today in relation to Imagine, I also want to start us off with a bit of inspiration and also give you the chance to share about a success story or a particular project.
People usually have kind of a baby that they want to share about. Do you have something that you would like to share today?
[00:12:28] Roland van der Heijden : The two main results that I've earlier also already mentioned. That is our vision. I'm very proud that we now at Rotterdam have succeeded in creating a vision on what the impact is of the digital transformation on our city and then mainly from the outside in perspective, as we call it there. So not necessarily from our point of view towards the outside world, but from the outside worlds towards the city.
And based on that vision, we have also determined some kind of role that we can or need to play in that new city. So I'm very proud of bringing that story into the world.
And the second thing is that we also have made it concrete with the development of our open urban platform in Rotterdam that really is now officially launched. So it's an operational platform now as being the centerpiece of that new digital infrastructure for the city and in which all kind of organizations in our ecosystem, but also the citizens themselves all can join that platform now and can share data, applications, whatever they want to share in the digital world with each other in a safe and responsible and trustworthy way. So that's very what I'm. Yeah, I think that's also a very big achievement. And that's also very interesting what Alfredo was mentioning, because that's the other side and that's something that we at Rotterdam have a lot to learn yet, because the inside organization is something completely different than what we now done, creating something on the outside for the city. But in that thing, we as a municipality are one of the organizations connected to that open platform, but therefore have still a lot of work to do to get our own things right there.
So that's very complimentary at what Alfredo is mentioning. So I hope to learn a lot from Alfredo, how he did that within Genoa, because that's a long way for us to go still.
[00:14:26] Tamlyn Shimizu: Well, great, Alfredo, tell us, how can you. Can you share any learnings from that?
[00:14:32] Alfredo Viglienzoni: So I think that a good story to share is another platform we developed and we launched late 2022.
It is called Senyalachi, which means every citizen, every visitor can actually provide the administration with a problem or a suggestion.
Let me give an example. I see a hole in the street and I make a picture. You don't need to tell me where the hole it is, because if you have like GSM on, it gets geolocalized automatically. And then, you know, depending on what the case is. In this case is a hole in the street, but depending it can be quite varied. There is like a tree of 1 to 140teapot per potential routes for the case to go. And then, you know, someone takes charge of it and then gets resolved. Now you can imagine, you know, the. It is extremely important for the organization to react properly from a signal getting from a citizen.
Initially, when this project was launched, the typical resolution time was about more than 70 days.
So that was a signal that things were not quite efficient and the overall organization was not acting fast enough and properly enough on a problem of one of our citizens. I have to say that these days the typical resolution time is less than four days, which means that by the time a citizen says there is a hole in the street, and the time in which the citizens get an image of the hole which has been filled, meaning that the problem is solved, takes four days.
So we addressed more than 75,000 cases from our citizens and this has been extremely interesting journey because again, what matters to me is not like a surface show and tell appearance. What matters to me is that substantially the organization delivers. And in this case we managed to basically streamline a lot of issues inside the municipality in such a way that by the time, you know, something is getting signaled, whatever the problem is, the problem is solved.
[00:17:19] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting project also to learn about. Thank you. I want to get into the challenges now. That's what we're here to talk about. So Roland Rotterdam’s challenge at Imagine 2025 is really focused on enhancing resilience in the face of water related risks, especially flooding. Which is understandable given your position since your city is already implementing large scale digital twin open urban data platform. Can you explain how you see the citiverse also supporting these efforts?
[00:17:53] Roland van der Heijden : So where the output of the heat stress analysis will be the input for a designing tool and we make a new design that will be the output of that will be the input again for that heat stress analysis. And you can also combine that with participation projects with your citizens or with all number of visualization managers with the XR glasses or whatever. So that's what that ecosystem of application is meant to be. And that's what we now in Rotterdam are going to develop this next year now. And in that at this moment we are able to see, for example, we have that water flooding model that shows us how fast and how far the water will come into the city. But what we at this moment are not able to see is okay, what are all the extra effects attaching that water? What will do to for example, the emergency response of the safety region, the firemen, etc. Which runs roads are still in use and what does it mean for the fireman or so all those related effects to that flooding? That's something I want to research and where we challenge companies to help us to better understand who that how that ecosystem of interactions between all kinds of related emergency issues combined to that flooding model that we have. What does that mean? And in this time for imagine, we especially that challenge companies to look at that through the safety perspective.
[00:19:28] Tamlyn Shimizu: A very vital challenge.
Where do you see also citizens coming to play? Because I do like this aspect of city versa, it's city focused, but also citizen focused.
Where do you see the citizens coming into this equation now?
[00:19:44] Roland van der Heijden : For example, one of the main aspects of our safety region to be more resilient is giving the citizens in advance the proper information and in cases of disaster, the ability to give them proper information.
Now especially of course now in the phase of in advance, you can imagine all kinds of scenarios that they can use to help those citizens to understand in what kind of situation they probably can end up and how to deal with it and let them experience that kind of possible scenarios. So that's one example.
[00:20:25] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Alfredo, I also want to get to your challenge. Your challenge is very citizen focused as well. And it's addressing a challenge that many cities have during this digital transformation, which is digital inclusion. Can you explain how you see this challenge and all the complexities of it?
[00:20:44] Alfredo Viglienzoni: So Genova has a lot of people who are aging, which is a very good thing. I mean, we have 390, more than 390 people who are more than 100 years old.
And we have more than 22,000 people over 90 years old.
And, you know, we have around the city many people who are maybe, you know, with disabilities like vision disabilities or mobility disabilities or in some cases depression or other kind of issues.
Now, having become 87% digital, we have been kind of shifting a little bit the paradigm the municipality used to have. Let me give you an example. There were some aspects of the municipality you could address. Only special offices with some special people were like experts of that specific subject matter. Now, I mean, everything is digital. So it is quite simple to actually accomplish any kind of request to the municipality in a quite simple way. The trick is that you need to have a minimum attitude to deal with a computer with, with an ICT system in a very simple way is not, you know, we try to have a very simple user interface, yet you need to be, you have to have a minimal education in terms of dealing with the digital systems. So now, I mean, we need to have people who can be the interface, the link between these, these people, these fragile people who could be old people or people with different fragility. Remember also that an issue we have here, especially along the coasts in Italy, we have a lot of immigrants coming from maybe temporary present here in our city. And these people must be included because they are also part of our community.
So in the spirit of not leaving anybody behind, it is fundamental to find a way to be able to kind of open the system to these people.
We want also to be able to allow people like our blind people to enjoy museums and theaters. We want people to be able to not be excluded because disability is not like. Is not a status of a person, is a problem which is induced by the environment around the person. So if you are able to, if you had like a very, very simple, paved, nicely paved road and you didn't have steps. A person who doesn't walk and is on a wheelchair can go wherever he wants. So in a sense, this person is not a disabled person. It becomes a disabled person if you have a lot of stairs and you are excluding this person from normal life. So this is what the person of our administration must avoid any issues for anybody. So we want to explore all the more advanced technologies and approaches that can be used to actually include, to make sure we include the poor, we include the old, we include the disabled, we include the fragile persons. And an issue where we connecting with what Roland was saying. We created a rain system to create an alert in terms of floods and so forth. We mapped our fragile people to make sure that we can help them in case something happens in the area where they live.
So for us, it's extremely important to again, to make sure we include every citizen, every person who is actually with us, even a visitor, of course, visit our city.
[00:25:36] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, wonderful challenge as well. Very important.
How do you imagine citiverse really answering this challenge? And maybe what other components besides citiverse do you think are really essential to tackle this challenge? Go ahead, Alfredo. Yet.
[00:25:54] Alfredo Viglienzoni: So I think that I studied a lot the Metaverse as a portfolio of technologies enabling people to interact with the Net, with the Internet, with the World Wide Web in a different way. And I do know that a number of technologies which are becoming available in a broad sense are going to mitigate fragilities.
So if you have an accelerometer in your hand and you move, barely move your hand, you don't need to handle anymore a mouse, but there is simply a movement of your hand that is achieving what you plan to do. There are some goggles and devices you can use to translate in real time languages into the language of a person who is not part of the municipality. Maybe he's speaking a kind of not typical language from Africa, but now we can interface with him or her in a more sensible way. So I'm talking about a portfolio of, of technologies and solution in, in a broad, in a broadly meant citiverse who can really, you know, all together, which can really enable the person to interact with the. With the best things the municipality can offer.
[00:27:23] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe that also leads into another question on how maybe to Roland, how do you feel?
Are you missing tools to really get to your goals to try and tackle this challenge?
What is really missing from your portfolio? What do you really hope for in the future that would help you achieve this much quicker?
[00:27:51] Roland van der Heijden : Also adding to what Alfredo was mentioning about the Metaverse, citiverse and that's also, I think what's in this shift is parts of what in my opinion is needed, the Metaverse, that umbrella of techniques, creating some kind of new world, and also that portfolio of possibilities. I think that Alfred was completely right. I think that that's what the first partly, in my opinion is about. But what makes City first different from the Metaverse is that it's human centered and that also relates to that physical world. So the Metaverse is in essence footloose. It can have physical connections, but in E it's about the virtual world. And I think the citiverse is about a connection with that physical world.
And what I also find challenging at this moment, because the citiverse is not really defined yet. So it's still a bit moving about what we think that the City first should be.
And what I think is appealing about this is that the citiverse maybe can help us understand what that new social, physical, digital city will be with the social, physical, digital operating citizens in the future.
Understanding what kind of thing that is and then relate back to. Okay, what does it mean? Because one aspect I think that Alfredo is not mentioning yet, and that I think is also very important, is that digital not only is a means to solve problems in that physical world in a broad portfolio of what I was mentioning and really correct, but it's also changing the reality we live in.
So to give you an example, if I now step into the metro in Rotterdam, there are 40 people sitting in that coupe there, but nobody is in that coupe. Everybody is in some kind of outer space world, digital wherever they are, but not in that coupe.
And what does that do to the reality we live in? So there's also reality is no longer physical. Some people still talk about, well, yeah, the real world, digital is becoming more and more a real world.
So we also need to reflect on what does it mean when people are partly, or maybe at some point largely living in the digital world and what does it do to the physical world so that also reverse thinking in that way. And I hope that the citiverse, the concept of citiverse, can help us understand what the new city will be. So not an explanation of the current city, but a new city in which digital is completely, fluidly connected with that. And what does it mean and what does that say about the world we live in today? So extrapolating from now towards the future, we're not going to solve those kind of issues or problems or things that come from the digital transformation.
[00:30:48] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. Alfredo, I saw you nodding a bit. Do you have something to add there or Maybe some additional experiences on really what's missing from the conversation or tools that are missing to help you solve your challenge.
[00:31:03] Alfredo Viglienzoni: So I know there are, you know, there is like a quick evolution of technologies like blooming moment because everybody is aware about the evolution of artificial intelligence on one side. So the, the latest developments of generative artificial intelligence. Everybody talks about a number of technologies to enable humanoid kind of robots.
But there are a lot of also new technologies which are becoming available, in particular in the kingdom of human machine interface.
I was part of a hackathon the MIT had some time ago, where people wearing devices meant for detecting electrical signal from your brain. We're able to drive small toys, machines, cars on the floor and make them curve without moving anything but just thinking about what the car should be doing. So it is a moment in which technologies are actually providing a whole raft of solutions, a quite set of diverse technologies.
And we need to look at all this in a more holistic way to deliver a better way of living to our citizens. This is what I'm passionate about. Make sure that people can live in a different way. And it's not a beauty contest. You see, when I was referring to wisdom is because I do not care about Geneva be first, Rotterdam second or vice versa.
For me it's important that every people, every person must enjoy a better way of living. It is very important.
It is not a beauty contest or a race.
Our ethical duty towards towards our citizens is to make their life better. And this is what the portfolio of technologies which are available around you are actually going to help and can make a significant impact.
[00:33:47] Roland van der Heijden : And to add to also your question, for instance, that sense has all those techniques. So one question, for example, that we are very interested in Rotterdam at this moment, that we also will research in our Excite project that we are doing is that we see in neighborhoods that a lot of the networks are shifting from what we call social physical networks. Meeting at the grocery or whatever, talking to each other, going towards the WhatsApp neighborhood app in which we inform each other.
What does that shift go towards? Social digital, you could say from social physical to social digital. What does that shift mean to the coherence of such a neighborhood? What are the positive effects, what are the negative effects? To understand much better what the impact of this is on the neighborhood and all the relations in the neighborhood. That's also something that we Rotterdam are very interested in and that we really want to know more about on how we can deal with that kind of issues that are new to us.
[00:34:50] Alfredo Viglienzoni: See Roland, this is a very good point because if you think about it, you know, human, you know, the Homo sapiens took millions of years to develop. Right? Thousands of years to develop.
Now the technology is asking humans to behave in different ways in matters of a lifetime. And we need to respect the animal we are.
We as an animal developed and live in a certain way.
And we cannot, we cannot live in a science fiction way, in a kind of a asking our, our body, our mind, and in a lifetime to adapt and become a different animal, to live in a different world.
[00:35:45] Roland van der Heijden : Yeah, and that makes it very fundamental because that shift, the shift of social, physical is something that we done for thousands, ten, thousands of years and now in decades, a large part of that is shifting towards social, digital.
And what are we doing? That's also a question that we could ask ourselves.
[00:36:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very good points and very interesting discussion.
With that, I have to end our interview part because we're running out of time. But thank you both for really your thoughts and your insights there. I would like to move to our fun segment and the segment that I've chosen for you today is called Freaky Friday.
Freaky Friday.
Switch places with your co interviewee and answer a few questions in their shoes.
If you remember the Lindsay Lohan movie where you switch places with your co interviewee and answer a few questions in their shoes.
So first off, Roland, I would have to ask you to imagine you are now switching places with Alfredo.
What solutions have you seen in Rotterdam that could help Genova with its challenges?
[00:37:04] Roland van der Heijden : I think that Genova have already done a very good job to position their own organization as a municipality.
And in my opinion, a very good next step would be to think, okay, how does our city, what are their needs on the terms of digital? And how can we help them to enable them in their needs and connections for digital? And what's the digital infrastructure which connects us as a municipality, but not only us as a municipality, but all those stakeholders in our city together with each other.
[00:37:39] Tamlyn Shimizu: I see you agreeing, so that's good.
Now, Alfredo, same question. If you imagine you're now switching places with Roland, what knowledge or insights from your work in your city would you use to solve Rotterdam's challenge?
[00:37:59] Alfredo Viglienzoni: So first of all, Rotterdam as a, as a, like a physical shape which is very different from my city. My city is, is really a long line because we are a kind of trapped between hills and sea and the slope is more than 45 degrees. In fact, if you, you know, the, the hills and the sea go. The sea goes down, goes, gets very deep quickly and the hills get very, very like high quickly as well.
So we are living in two different kind of geographies.
But I think Rotterdam has done an exceptionally good job in developing a lot of solutions and technology. I do watch sometime what you've done and you got great solutions in your city. Your market, I remember is extremely beautiful with the lights you have, you know, lights in your market still come to my mind as well as the, the, there is a, if I'm not wrong, there is a place where houses are like, are like little toys. I mean it's a beautiful, beautiful areas in your city. If I had ever had to live in Rotterdam, I would love to, to buy a house in that, in that area. And you know, you, so I, you know, I, I love the, the attitude of people in Rotterdam. Extremely active and problem solvers, which gets a little bit different when you come to the Mediterranean. We are not exactly, exactly the same. But you know, being. I keep coming to the point that we are all citizens of a big, big world. And if you put together our acts, sharing solutions in my way is not a beauty contest.
It's just making an effort to improve life for all of us. We would live in a much better world. I think.
[00:40:21] Roland van der Heijden : That’s also nice. Why we call the citiverse and we don't write it with an why from city as a city, but city citizens first. It's about the citizen at last in what kind of city they live.
[00:40:35] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. I, I love that, that concept that city versus becoming. As you mentioned, it's still a little bit confused sometimes with the definition, but I think it's becoming firmer and firmer that it is all about the citizen at the, at the heart of it. So now we come to the final question, which is the question we ask every single guest and that is to you, what is a smart city? Roland, do you want to have a crack at it first?
[00:41:06] Roland van der Heijden : I always have a bit of difficulty with that kind of question because are we now dumb cities then?
And what we also saw was that when we were working on a lot of number of smart city solutions that when we added up it didn't make us a smart city because we saw that if we let everybody do it his way, then we will end up with a smart city pole for lighting and a smart pole for parking and a smart pole for communication, WI fi and a smart pole for air. So then we would have public space in the city which on every meter we had another smart pole. So that's not smart. So what is smart as smart is Mainly about organization. Much more about organization and cultural change and that kind of elements than it is about techniques.
[00:41:57] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, I really like that.
Good.
Alfreda, you have a different definition.
[00:42:06] Alfredo Viglienzoni: So in my view, what you need to care about is the quality of life and the opportunities your citizens have, right? So you need to exploit everything that comes about to make life and offer solutions that are better. Now, when ict, Internet, computers, smartphones, all these technologies came, they have been adopted by citizens and the city is making use of such technologies. So you know, ict, first of all, information communication technologies to improve life of your citizen. In my view, ICT is like a fourth utility, beyond gas, water. And you have also ict. So Internet connection is a key value now for our lives. And you need to exploit all this to improve life of your citizens. This to me is a smart city. And, and as you know, Roland lives in a city which doesn't have too many hills. I live on on a city in a city which doesn't have too many fl. Flat areas.
We need to exploit such technologies to make life better in the context where we are.
[00:43:28] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very good. Thank you both for that perspective. It's always a fun question to ask because you get so many different answers, as you can imagine.
Now, that's all I have for you today. First off, I have to say thank you to you both for coming on, spending your time with me, answering my questions, giving all your insights and experiences. Thank you so much.
[00:43:48] Alfredo Viglienzoni: Thank you. And I look forward to seeing you in Tampere.
[00:43:52] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yes, indeed. And to all of our listeners, I also have to thank you and remind you that these challenges are part of Imagine 25, where cities, innovators and visionaries will come together in temporary, as we mentioned, on the 27th and 28th of May. So you should not miss it, especially if you're passionate about building smarter, more inclusive and resilient cities. I will link the registration code and the link in the show notes so you can check it out there. And as always, you know that you can always create a free account on BABLE Dash, SmartCities, EU and you can find out more about implementation, smart city projects and more. So thank you very much.
[00:44:35] Tamlyn Shimizu: Thank you all for listening.
[00:44:36] Tamlyn Shimizu: I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
