14 Sep Keynote speaker in ‘How Does A Smart City Deliver Prosperity & Inclusiveness?’ Edinburgh (Scotland). 23th September 2016.

Dr Igor Calzada gave a keynote speaker in the MACI Innovations Future City event in support of Rowan Alba a homelessness charity based in Edinburgh. In the event, in addition to the speakers coming from MACI Innovations and Rowan Alba, the Future Cities Catapult participated as well. The presentation revolved around issues like social innovation, economic development, social cohesiveness, entrepreneurship and community engagement in a comparative global perspective. Primarily to reply to this main question:

• Smart city and its own ‘terminological universe’ has already become a ‘buzzword.’
• In order to ground ‘flashy’ ideas into urban realities, we require joint actions from the institutions, firms, academia and civil society.
• Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, are leading the urban transformation era by pushing forward the rest of the Scottish city-network.
• But, is the smart city approach that has been implemented so far, embedded in the social and urban fabric?
• Is the smart city discourse overcoming the digital and social divide in our communities?
• In the age of the new religion called dataism, can we all reduce to systems of data and logarithms?
• How is homelessness considered in the so-called smart city initiatives so far?
• Is homelessness part of the problem or the solution?
• How could we implement networked socially innovative programmes in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen, Inverness,…in collaboration with regional stakeholders?
• How the smartness is taking place in the rest of the UK, in Europe and worldwide?
• Is it time to re-shape the smart city discourse with a unique Scottish way-of-doing-things by fusing the economic development and the social cohesiveness?
• At the end of the day, everything boils down to the way institutions, people and communities interact and produce sustainable urban responses by mean of smart policy and politics in a more democratic way.
• Let’s observe what’s going on outside our cities in Scotland and let’s find the way to connect the smartness in the way we conceive the urban life in our communities around the nation. Are we ready?

Here is the presentation it was delivered:

I did initiate a non-conventionally-academic presentation with a poem, written by a Basque author called ‘Any Roof’: