The “City as a Platform” workshop was an opportunity to reflect on municipal management in the context of Smart Cities and to promote the debate on the main challenges of the coming years for cities, highlighting the innovation and technology specifically developed to make cities smarter . The Smart Cities Tour is an initiative organized by the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP) through the Intelligent Cities Section, in partnership with NOVA-IMS and Altice Portugal.
The event’s opening session was attended by the following speakers: Alexandre Fonseca, Executive President of Altice Portugal, Miguel Gaspar, City Councilor of Lisbon, António Almeida Henriques, Vice-President of the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities and President of the ANMP’s Intelligent Cities Section, and Miguel de Castro Neto, Head of the NOVA Cidade – Urban Analytics Lab.
During his speech, Alexandre Fonseca, Executive President of Altice Portugal, revealed his vision for the cities of the future: “better and more sustainable cities”.
The CEO stressed the importance of integrating and sharing information among local authorities, municipalities, territories and the understanding of each region needs, pointing to both the need for greater proximity between people and the expansion of the products and services portfolio that corresponds to the growing needs of society and cities, something that is being done by Altice Portugal.
Strategy and vision was also reinforced by Alcino Lavrador, general manager of Altice Labs, marking presence as speaker at the “City as a Platform” workshop, presenting the evolution of urban intelligence theme.
The general manager of Altice Labs paralleled the evolution of intelligence in the telecommunications operators networks in the last 30 years and the predictable urban intelligence evolution, noting that the existence of a centralized platform concentrating the intelligence of the city and fed by connectivity networks, without the carrier-grade characteristics offered by operators, will be insufficient to ensure the availability of services to citizens in the future”. Intelligence began to be distributed, then centralized and nowadays, taking into account the services which require a real-time response, it is necessary to decentralize it again. All this supported in a network that implements functions of self-organization, self-correction, predictive analysis, among others”, said Alcino Lavrador.
During the morning, participants had the opportunity to attend other conferences, presentations, pitches and even share experiences and networking. The Smart Cities Tour also allows to demonstrate the various smart city solutions developed by Altice Labs such as DataPlaxe, the City Governance Center and the Sharing Lisbon app.