‘Thriving Cities’
The Incheon Free Economic Zone Authority (IFEZ) announced that New Cities Summit 2017 takes place from June 7 to 9 at the Songdo Convensia located in the Songdo International Business District. The summit is expected to make a great contribution to the growth of Incheon City and the IFEZ by creating new business opportunities and helping them lead the global smart city market.
Co-hosted by the IFEZ and the New Cities Foundation, the summit is scheduled to be attended by more than 800 smart city experts, politicians, scholars and entrepreneurs from over 50 countries around the world. There, they are going to select various agenda items related to smart city while creating business opportunities in different industries and proposing new city models.
Established in 2010 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the New Cities Foundation aims to create better future cities. The foundation has co-hosted five New Cities Summits since 2012, sponsored by leading global enterprises and the host cities. The first summit was in Paris, France, the upcoming summit in Incheon City is the sixth one and the first New Cities Summit in Asia was the fourth in Jakarta, Indonesia.
This year’s theme is Thriving Cities: The Building Blocks of Urban Wellbeing. On-site smart city tours are scheduled for the first day of the event and presentations, group discussion sessions, round-table conferences and workshops are slated to follow on June 8 and 9, covering the understanding of urban wellbeing, digital urban development, eco-friendly urban space design, etc.
The summit participants are to share their ideas and opinions as to what a city needs for people to be able to enjoy the best life, what a future city should be like in putting their welfare first, how smart city technology should be utilized for the completion of urban wellbeing, and so on.
“New Cities Summit 2017 will be an opportunity for the IFEZ to increase its presence as a leading global city by setting trends in the global smart market and establishing industrial platforms to lead the development of technology for urban innovation,” said IFEZ Commissioner Lee Young-geun.
In June last year, the commissioner participated in the New Cities Summit in Montreal, Canada. He signed an agreement for this year’s summit in Songdo there and the IFEZ has run a task force for this year’s event since then.