Barcelona entered into partnerships with Cisco,
Telefonica, Abertis, Agbar and Schneider-Telvent to promote the Smart City
Campus, an area
dubbed 22@, a new district in the Poblenou area of Barcelona.

The smart city campus will focus on the development of
businesses, universities, entrepreneurship, ICT research centers, ecology and
urban planning.

The Barcelona City Council has sought strategic relationships
with these worldwide technology players to convert Barcelona into a laboratory
for experimentation and innovation.

Barcelona City Hall and Cisco are collaborating to
promote an integrated urban platform which allows for the development of functional
technological applications to improve the efficiency and quality of services
received by citizens.

In February 2011 Cisco Chairman and CEO, John Chambers,
met with Jordi Hereu, the mayor of Barcelona to announce the initiative that
will use technology as an enabler to help transform Barcelona into a blueprint
for modern urban development. The initiative placed Cisco’s Urban Platform
Reference Architecture at the heart of the city’s vision to become a global
reference model for sustainable urban development and the economic engine for
Southern Europe.

“Cisco is a leader in internet and communications
infrastructure. Together we are working in the development of an urban platform
that allows us to integrate current and new public services with the aim of
improving efficiency in their management and quality of the services offered to
citizens,” said Jordi Botifoll, senior vice-president of Cisco for the
South of Europe.

We believe that Barcelona is a point of reference that
allows us to scale both experiences and knowledge to other cities. In short, it
is a model that aims to transform the way cities are designed, built and
renewed in order to ensure economic sustainability, social and
environmental,” Botifoll added.

By Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]