Participants called for future-friendly solutions and resilience in energy systems

Urban Development Week discusses smart cities and making them more viable

The “Urban and Rural Development Week” is held as part of the pre-Expo 2020 Dubai activities.

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Officials participating in the "Urban and Rural Development Week", which is held as part of the pre-launch activities of "Expo 2020 Dubai", stressed the importance of reinvestment and renewal to make cities more viable, more inclusive, sustainable and innovative, and to renew urban areas, stressing the need for appropriate solutions. For the future, adopting flexibility, whether it is in energy systems or supply chains that provide drinking water to remote areas, or mobility and other infrastructure elements.

Safe conditions

Reem bint Ibrahim Al Hashemi, Minister of State for International Cooperation and Director General of the Dubai Expo 2020 Bureau, said in a speech: “The challenge before us now is to design a building scheme that guarantees safe and inexpensive living conditions, which is a basic right for everyone, and envisions resilient habitats. And sustainable does not put any pressure on the environment that we belong to ».

She added that the founding father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, may God rest his soul, has always emphasized this matter, which is to achieve a balance between building the state's infrastructure and the need to respect and preserve our land that God has blessed us with.

Viability

For her part, the Mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, said that the current challenge is resilience, and it is imperative to reinvest, renew and re-operate to make cities more viable, more inclusive, sustainable and innovative.

She added in her speech: “The lives of many people in cities have been severely affected by the current pandemic, which left us facing a greater challenge, and this prompted us to accelerate existing processes, such as the renewal of urban areas,” stressing the need to redevelop neglected spaces and places that were not appropriate to the needs of the region.

Cities of the future

In the same context, Helmut von Struff, CEO of Siemens in the UAE and the Middle East, stressed the importance of solutions being appropriate for the future.

"Technology allows us to design new solutions to existing problems, but we can no longer be proud of our focus on achieving instantaneous satisfaction," he said.

“Flexibility is the basis of everything,” he added.

Whether it is the energy systems that form the backbone of our contemporary lives, the supply chains that provide drinking water to remote areas, mobility and other infrastructure elements that help improve our lives, buildings that provide us with safety, or the distinctive innovations that allow us to make a difference in our daily life".

"We are working at (Expo 2020 Dubai) to transform this vision of resilience into a global reality, and by connecting 137 buildings to an energy analysis platform based on cloud computing and other systems, we are efficiently creating a blueprint that will form the basis for future smart cities around the world."

A UN program

In addition, the Executive Director of the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat), Maymouna Mohamed Sharif, pointed out that there is a close link between urban and rural spaces economically, socially and environmentally at a time when we cannot look at either of them properly in isolation from the other.

She added, "We at UN-Habitat are pleased to work with (Expo 2020 Dubai) on events related to urban and rural areas, with a focus on reaching everyone in slums and slums, and we also look forward to working on effective practical solutions that do not exclude anyone or any place."

Sites for innovators

The vice president of District 2020 - the Transitional Unit, Nadima Mahra, said that smart cities will become sites for innovators to use to take a people-centered approach to solving problems.

She emphasized that "District 2020" wants to become a test platform for new technologies and innovations that will be enabled through cooperation between the many entities that will host it.

By activating programs such as “Skill 2 Dubai” and the urban laboratory, and by nurturing minds to unleash the energies, we believe that cooperation and the desire to achieve a common goal will contribute to making a future that is safer, sustainable and focused on societies.

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