Smart Sustainable Cities Reconnaissance Study Smart Sustainable Cities – Reconnaissance Study Authors Elsa Estevez, Senior Academic Programme Officer, UNU-EGOV Nuno Vasco Lopes, Postdoctoral Fellow, UNU-EGOV Tomasz Janowski, Head, UNU-EGOV Partners United Nations University Operating Unit on Policy-Driven Electronic Governance (UNU-EGOV), http://egov.unu.edu International Development Research Center (IDRC), http://www.idrc.ca Contacts UNU-EGOV,
[email protected] Matthew Smith, Senior Program Officer, IDRC Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank IDRC for co-funding the preparation of this report. Particular thanks are due to Matthew Smith and Laurent Elder who championed the project from the very beginning. We also wish to thank John Bertot (University of Maryland, USA), Wojciech Cellary (Poznań University of Economics, Poland) and Ruhiya Seward (IDRC, Canada) for valuable comments. Last but not least, we wish to thank a group of international experts who were interviewed for this report: Jasmith Barrera (Manager, Spatial Data Infrastructure for the District Capital, Bogotá, Colombia), Ricardo Costa (Deputy Mayor, Municipality of Guimarães, Portugal), Jaime Lerner (Architect and Urban Planner, former Governor of the State of Paraná, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil), Marco Peres (Director, Observatorio de Sociedad, Gobierno y Tecnologías de la Información, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Colombia), Juan Prada (Director, Information Technology, Municipality of Montevideo, Uruguay) and Lark Yang Tan (Director, Infocomm Development Authority International, Singapore Government). iii Executive Summary The global urban population is expected to grow by 63 percent between 2014 and 2050 – compared to an overall global population growth of 32 percent during the same period. Megacities with over 20 million inhabitants will see the fastest increase in population – and at least 13 new megacities are expected by 2030, in addition to the 28 existing today.