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SME4SMARTCITIES project had the opportunity to attend the “Greencities and S-Moving Forum” in Málaga, Spain in a time when smart city developments and innovations are crucial to be implemented and boosted due to COVID-19 pandemic.

The mayor of Málaga, Francisco de la Torre, highlighted the importance of the collaboration public and private and the compromise of the citizens to improve the cities of the future. This statement was also shared by the president of AMETIC (Multisectoral Association of Information Technology, Communications, Digital contents and Electronics Companies), who stood out the opportunities arising from this crisis for businesses. Also the University of Málaga explains the need to go further in the practice, towards kinder and safer cities. Finally, the national government pushed the mayors to become the starring actors of this cities revolution.

In general, on the discussions and speeches which took place, it was reaffirmed once again that the inhabitants need their cities to be more sustainable, cleaner, and more adapted to the new and current situation this pandemic has brought to us, for example, reorganising the mobility flows between cities and countryside localities.

This change, as all the speakers explained, needs a real compromise between innovative companies and public institutions which are in charge of managing every single side of their cities.

Focusing on our project and asking ourselves how we can add some value to that compromise, we were able to make a brief contact with some of the most innovative companies related to Smart Cities and we explained them our project and mission in order to get them involved with it and be able to create a societal benefit with their innovative solutions.

Among the exhibitors we found: Sporttia, a company focused on make sport infrastructures smarter; Eridanis, is an innovation consultancy based in Paris (France) which works on several fields, all of them related to smart cities; Inquieto, a company which was born with the purpose of reducing e-commerce increasing impact on cities’ pollution and reducing as well the number of highly-polluting delivery vehicles; Libelium, a technological company focused on wireless technologies to control and monitor environmental factors as level of pollution, noise, quality and water waste; HOPU (Human Oriented Products) is focused on devices which are able to improve the general inhabitants’ quality of life they are able to detect, measure and monitor pollution levels, noise, mobility flows, level of pollen and other substances which might affect people’s health following the United Nations parameters.

Eventually, in Greencities forum we could see the interaction of some of the most innovative companies taking short networking meetings with public institutions from the cities (Málaga, Valencia, Almería…) they wanted to assist to this fair. This gives us the path to follow on the next months and be able to boost the implementation of smart cities innovations which companies could offer to the cities and make, now more important than ever, cities more habitable, sustainable and cleaner, in general, smarter.