Shanghai crowned smart city of the year at Smart City Live 2020

Source: Smart Cities World Published: November 19th, 2020

Shanghai has been named 2020 smart city of the year at the Smart City Live summit, run by Smart City Expo World Congress.

Other winners at the online event included a future of work programme delivered to Zambia by US company Werkit as part of the Global Digital Marketplace project in a new Covid-19 innovation category.

Smart Shanghai

Shanghai’s smart city plan, which has run from 2016-2020, focused on the development of a range of activities and resources including the deployment of an “intensive” digital Infrastructure, e-government services, a City Brain and the integration of information technology and industry.

Called Smart Shanghai – People-Oriented Smart City, the plan envisioned the deployment of the digital infrastructure needed to become the first “dual gigabit” city, achieving full 5G coverage in the downtown area and also accomplishing a gigabit fiber coverage of 99 percent in the city. The e-government initiative has proven to be a useful tool for its citizens and registered more than 14.56 million users within a total population of over 24 million.

Werkit’s Innovative adaptations to the Future of Work enables access to remote digital jobs in the African country and provides digital banking services, skill advancement assistance and a virtual community of support to the Sub-Saharan youth who have suffered rising unemployment rates and low wages due to the impact of Covid-19.

The Shenzen Government Services Data Bureau won the Enabling Technologies category with its Digital City – Technology Makes a Better City initiative, aimed at improving the city’s livelihood services and city governance capabilities in order to become a modern, international and innovation-based city. Among the actions undertaken are strengthening the digital infrastructure, free WLAN coverage in public spaces, epidemic prevention management and smart policing.

In the Urban Environment section, the winner was the Mindsphere City Graph platform by Microsoft and Siemens. The City Graph enables contextual integration and analysis within cities, districts or campuses. The platform builds digital twins of real entities in a city and optimizes city operations step-by-step, through IoT and advanced analytics.

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Photo by Edward He on Unsplash

Chelsea McCullough