High density of cities has facilitated conditions for productivity gains and income growth, but also resulted new urban issues challenging the path to sustainable development. While occupying 2% of the global landmass, cities generate over 80% of the global wealth and generate 70% of the world¡¯s emissions.
In this backdrop, global cities have been strengthening their commitments towards sustainable development and adopting strategies to meet UN Sustainable development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Accord targets. For developing countries, smart solutions leveraging low-cost and high impact technologies are widely available to assist cities for sustainable and resilient development. However, these scalable solutions require careful planning and coordination so that these solutions are centered on the users. Whilst deploying these solutions, it is equally important to expand the institutional capacity of governing organizations and to ensure that no citizen is left out from the digital divide.
ľ¹ÏÓ°Ôº Tokyo Development Learning Center (TDLC) has been collaborating with the City of Yokohama, a partner city of TDLC¡¯s City Partnership Program (CPP), along with Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) in the Asia Smart City Conference in Japan to bring together Japanese and global experiences in applying low-carbon smart solutions to achieve sustainable urban development.
, commenced online on October 26, 2021, focused on the theme of ¡°Building smart cities aiming for carbon neutrality through city-to-city collaboration¡± and brought together representatives from major Asian cities, government agencies, international organizations, academic institutions and the private sector.
ľ¹ÏÓ°Ôº session of ASCC, hosted by TDLC, featured insights from World Bank urban development practitioner to presented overview of smart city development with case studies from developing countries. It also presented case studies from Japan on smart city development solutions and policies.