Energy Forum 29: Smart Cities

Most of the world’s population today lives in cities. In order to continuously serve and improve the increasing population’s life quality, there is a growing need to develop smart cities. A smart city strives to optimally and sustainably utilize available resources, while maintaining adequate balance between social, environmental and economic costs. There are many benefits on the national level to promoting smart cities: enhancing competitiveness, boosting the business sector, improving quality of living, better usage of resources and more. Israel carries unique attributes, including: educated population, extensive usage of IT systems and moderately-sized cities.  At the same time, there are challenging aspects in Israel, such as severe lack of available land, security concerns and markets centralization. The forum participants expressed their views concerning the need for an holistic approach in city planning, with section-wide coordination. Such processes are taking place in several cities around the world, though the issue as whole is still in early-stages – successes and challenges were reviewed by the forum.