Smart City Expo World Congress Barcelona 2024

I'm joined by Monica Lucarelli, Councillor for Economic Development and Equal Opportunities at the Municipality of Rome.
Considering your position, I would like to kick off our discussion with, do smart cities make a city safer and more equal?
The smart city (industry) of course, wants to have every service in a digital way, but if you have a smartphone and you don't know how to use it, just to make a very simple example, you don't have the possibility to catch the opportunities that smart cities give to you.
And so the risk, real risk, is that the gap increases instead of reducing.
And for the security as well, because, if you have everything online, oriented in a digital way, but you don't care about the security and cybersecurity risk, you have your data going everywhere, and everybody could come and pick them up and use it, and study you.
And so there are, of course, opportunities and risks.
And we all together have to manage and in a very attentive way.
What smart projects can make a city safer and more equal?
I think that the first thing is to give a city a very strong, digital infrastructure, telecommunication.
That is very important because if you don't give everybody the possibility to have the mobile infrastructure to join, of course, the services that you have in a smart city, you don't give everybody the same possibility.
And so I think that that is the base.
On the base you can build on, of course.
Add very multiple, hundreds and hundreds of possibilities and applications in every field.
What jobs are expected to come out of smart city advancements?
For sure, all the jobs that are connected with stem fields.
So, scientific, technological and engineering and so on.
For sure also artificial intelligence will propose new jobs.
That is also based on a different way of thinking about, philosophy or sociology because, artificial intelligence is based on the data and if you don't have the real data, the risk is that biased (decisions) will go up.
And so we need to have the right competencies and jobs to manage this risk and to reduce it.
And so I think that with the combination of these different skills, there will be the real possibility to avoid the risk and to take all the opportunities.
When thinking of the future, what are the goals of Rome in its digital transformation?
I think that the real big goal is to match tradition and innovation.
If we reach the goal to use innovation to improve all the tradition, the, historical heritage and so on, I think that that will be the real challenge to win.