WHOW! Festival | Brazil 2020 | Jonathan Reichental Keynote

Hi there. I'm Dr. Jonathan Reichental and I'm so glad to be here at the wow Festival in Brazil. I wish I was there in person, but of course I can't be right now. Hopefully in the near future. I love Brazil. I love the people and I love the culture and I love the food and the music and so much more. Hopefully I will get back really, really soon. But today I want to talk to you about the future and I want to talk about an optimistic picture of the future. I'd like to talk to you about smart cities and how far away are Brazilian cities, for example, in becoming smarter and more sustainable. And that's the topic I want to share with you today. I'm going to take you on a little bit of a journey so that we can explore this topic, understand it better, and then look towards the future. It really is a very big topic. As I think many of you know, most of the world now lives in an urban context. Well over halfway now and approaching by the middle of the century, 70% or so. And as we head towards the end of the century, even more people will live in an urban center. We move into cities today at a rate of about 2 million people per week. It's a phenomenal migration from the rural world to the urban world. We're also building infrastructure at a rate of the size and scale of Manhattan in New York every single month. And we will do that for the next 40 years. It's pretty remarkable. Our cities are where we are creating a lot of carbon emissions, and we contribute about 70% towards climate change. But our cities are also a place where 70 to 80% of all economic activity now lies. They are the biggest generator of GDP or gross domestic product in the world. They're pretty important places. This is where we work, where we live, where we play. We want better quality of lives. We want better quality of lives for more people. Today. Our cities are not inclusive enough, and not everybody has access to the same capabilities and opportunities that are afforded to others. So let's look at some of those challenges and then how we might address them. This picture here shows traffic. A typical American city congested with cars. You know, cars have been really very positive for the last 100 years. In many ways, they've transformed our cities. They've transformed the way we get around. They've transformed how we deliver products and services. So they've been of incredible use, but it's come at a price. Our automobile culture has come at a price. For example, the carbon emissions have contributed towards a changing Climate. And today we find ourselves in a climate emergency. Our cars also create enormous congestion, which messes with our mental health because we sit in this traffic waiting and waiting. I know this for a fact in Brazil too. I've spent time in Rio de Janeiro and, and Sao Paulo, and particularly in Sao Paulo, one of the mega cities of the world. As you know, the traffic is not great. We sit in traffic a lot, and cars create accidents. 1.4 million people are killed in car accidents. That's 1.4 million brothers and sisters and children and parents and friends and colleagues, and who knows how many, many, many millions of people are injured. So cars really are a key part of the operations of our cities. The issues of our cities today and the design of our cities. If we're going to create better communities and lower the climate impact we have, lower the probability of accidents, have more efficient ways of getting around, we've got to tackle transportation. This is a common thing among cities all over the world. There are few cities that I've ever been to that don't have a traffic issue. And finally, we have spent a large part of this century building new cities that are built around cars and not around people. We have to build cities for people and not for cars. And in our old cities, in our ancient classic cities in Europe and South America and all over the world, we have to retrofit our cities to accommodate trucks and cars and all sorts of motorized vehicles at great cost to our ancient artifacts. We need to give back our cities to people. Now, our cities have created a high quality of life for the most amount of people of any human invention. In fact, cities are the most complicated and successful inventions of humanity. But again, much like transportation, it's come at a price. The World Health Organization tells us that in the region of 2 to 3 million, people are directly or indirectly impacted and can die because of air quality. Our abundant lifestyles of consumerism require factories and chemical productions that spew poor quality particles into the atmosphere. And we breathe it in. Our cities are coming at a price in many, many communities around the world. And there's a byproduct. When we buy products from stores and we get deliveries, and we're excited to get that package on our doorstep. It comes in packaging, and often it comes in plastic packaging. And that plastic is hard to dispose of. It doesn't deteriorate quickly. Some plastic takes thousands of years. It doesn't get recycled as much as it should. Some of that plastic flows, and because of dumping and other circumstances, it flows into the center of the Pacific Ocean. And it's caught in this thing we call a gyre. And there's one particular gyre of plastic, a great big plastic heap in the center of the Pacific that's the size of the country of France that's full of plastic. That's not bottles and packaging. It's little plastic beads. Because with the motion of the ocean, the plastic is broken down into little beads, these tiny little things. So if you go to the center of the Pacific, into the sky, you're not going to see lots and lots of bottles floating on the surface. What you're going to do if you put a net through it is pick up a lot of tiny little plastic particles and beads, and the fish eat these beads and particles. And unfortunately, we like fish and we eat the fish. So we're eating the plastic ourselves. We're consuming this chemical property, and we don't know yet what that means to us. We got to manage all this waste that we create, or better still, we need to not create the waste in the first place. Our societies and cities here in the 21st century have lifted millions of people out of extreme poverty. Between the years 2005 and 2013, in the great country of India, over 200 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty because of our urbanization, largely because of our urbanization. It's been a success story. But. And there's a but in all these slides. Not everybody is prospering. Cities aren't yet able to serve everybody. And for that reason, they are not all inclusive. People, because of their circumstances and their health and a whole variety of dimensions, cannot thrive, cannot move out of poverty. And in fact, by moving into cities or not being successful in cities, their conditions can be rather poor. And we see this in every country in the world. We see great cities trying to do amazing things, but they're not serving everybody. And so we need to make our societies more inclusive with better equality and equity. And we're going to do that in our cities, because that's where everybody is now. The big issue, the big challenge of the 21st century, and it's an existential threat in reality, over the long term, is our climate emergency. Climate emergency is being created by not only natural circumstances, but the intense activities of human beings over the last century and our increasing consumption, our increasing use of carbon energy, and a whole range of behaviors that we need to change. For many of you, this is not a new topic. It sounds rather repetitive. But now the topic has to move from talking about it and understanding it to actually taking action around the world over 600 cities, over 600 cities are on coastlines. And those 600 or so cities contain about 1.3 to 1.5 billion people. So as the sea level rise continues, we will see coastal flooding which will impact these cities and impact these people. There'll be more flooding with climate emergency. The storms are more fierce, the droughts are drier and longer. With our climate change, the oceans are more acidic, and that's killing our fish and other sea life. We have an existential threat. As the temperature of the Earth increases over the last 100 years, it's increased by 1 degree Celsius on average, and we're headed towards 1.5. And if we don't change our behavior soon, we'll hit 2 degrees Celsius on average increase around the globe. That may not sound like a lot, but you only have to go back three or maybe four degrees and you get to the Ice Age. If you go forward three degrees or more, the Earth gets so hot it becomes difficult for life to survive. Now, we may be moving forward with rising temperatures, but we can certainly slow them down. And we can also mitigate. We can do better in how we design our cities and where we put our cities. Climate change is a central challenge that will be solved, largely solved and managed, if we can solve it at all, but certainly managed in our cities. Now, when we think of cities, we often think of a scenario like this, an environment like this. Here you have a typical government office. This one happens to be in San Francisco, in California, here in the west coast of the United States. And this is where people go to get their driver's license, either a new one or to renew it or to change their address. It's not a very pleasant experience to sit and wait and wait for hours for a number to be called or your name to be called. And then perhaps you will go to a counter and if you're missing a document, you might have to come back another day. And you've wasted yet another day. Everybody knows this problem. This is the cliche of bureaucracy in government. And unfortunately, myself being a government leader for a long time, some of that cliche is real, very, very real in almost every city in the world. And so we don't necessarily wake up in the morning and say, I can't wait to go to a government office. I'm so excited to go and process a form or make a request. We can improve this. We can make this situation better. In fact, what we desire, many of us, is to have a better experience. And in fact, have an experience that's very similar to, to what we have when we work with organizations in the private sector. We want the same smartphone or smartwatch or laptop browser experience with government, similar to how we have it when we work with so many different features and capabilities of the private sector. So rather than this, rather than a situation like this, what we want is to be able to interact with government like this. We need a digitalization of cities. And the good news is it's starting and in many places it's rapidly happening. We're moving more and more services to smartphones and smartwatches and smart assistants and our laptop and desktop computers. But we have a ways to go to convert all the hundreds of thousands of services that are provided and put them in a digital format. But it does represent an incredible opportunity, a remarkable opportunity for cities and for providers and entrepreneurs and innovators. Now the exciting thing about thinking about our cities and the opportunities is that they are so diverse. They're so diverse. You could be like me, a person who loves the whole thing. You know, I'm very interested in every element of our cities, everything from buildings to public safety to energy and health care and education and beyond. But you can also be a specialist. You can look at one area and you can say, hey, you know what? I'm very interested in how we can move to, to clean, abundant energy for our communities. It's a remarkably diverse space. And when you think of a smart city or making our city smarter and more sustainable, we have to think in holistic terms. We have to think big picture. This is not a narrow, singular topic. This is a vast, complicated topic of problems that need to be solved and made more efficient. What does it look like? I was really struck by this statistic here. This is only a few weeks old since from the time of recording now to when this came out, came out in late September. And it's a company called Frost and Sullivan, a well respected analyst firm. They look at all sorts of areas of our economy from things like healthcare to retail, agriculture. And also they analyze the future of our cities. And their conclusion in their latest report, looking at 2025 is this represents a multi trillion dollar opportunity. In fact, they have a number, they put a number of $2.4 trillion of economic value is going to be created by building better cities and improving our existing cities by, by the year 2025. That's a remarkable amount of opportunity. And who's going to take advantage of that? Sure, it's going to be the incumbents. There's lots of Tech companies and existing city providers. But let's invite others. Let's invite many, many more to participate in this opportunity so that we have more ideas, more innovators, more risk takers, people who think big or think differently. We need all those people trying to figure out, how do we make our cities better, more inclusive and more sustainable. Well, let's transition here and talk a little bit about some of the solutions and where we're headed. Now. I want to take you to one of my favorite examples of how things are changing in our communities and how we can think differently and take risks and have really good outcomes. In these images you see on one side here, if you can see my hand sometimes, here we go. On this side, you see New York City. This is Times Square, an incredible place. I encourage you all to visit one day. Some of you, I imagine, have. And in Times Square, traditionally, it's a very busy area, really busy area. Lots of people rushing to their destination, a lot of tourists taking photographs. Lots of taxi cabs and trucks and buses and motorcycles and bicycles. It's just a. It's just an amazing sort of intersection of everything about life and humanity in an urban context. Well, it's also not the healthiest place. It's not. It's noisy, there's a lot of pollution. It's dangerous because many people get knocked over by these vehicles rushing from place to place. And so the question became, and this goes back now a few years, could we pedestrianize? Could we give this part of the city back to the people? Could we get rid of the vehicles for a short amount of time? Perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps a month or three months, and then go back to this. Could we try it out? And so the city tried an experiment. And here you can see on this side what happened when the area was pedestrianized. You can see people wandering around. You can see people having coffee. You know, there's more people, they're more spread out. There's more life in this picture. And. And in fact, we are giving Times Square back to the community and away from cars, a phenomenon that we see all over the world. Now, what happened when we did this? Well, the first thing is the taxi companies and the bus drivers and the truck drivers were not happy. Their assessment was that the circumstances, the situation would deteriorate, that the traffic would get worse all around Manhattan because of the pedestrianization of Times Square. It was a real concern. But sometimes you got to take a risk. Sometimes you got to be bold. You got to try new things. Well, it was done. And unintuitively the traffic actually improved. It improved by rerouting it in a more optimum way. In addition, people really loved it. It attracted more tourists and more locals, and it really created a sense of place. In fact, it became so successful that it was made permanent. Today, Times Square in the center of Manhattan and New York City is pedestrianized. Of all the places in the world, this seems the least likely to be pedestrianized. And yet it's one of the first major urban areas to go totally back to the people. What a great, bold thing to do for the leadership of New York City and the mayor at the time. And I visited there and it's really quite amazing. You know, the saying is that New York is the city that never sleeps. And I can tell you, I was there pretty late. I was there around 2am I think, after a nice dinner and going to a bar. And I went to Times Square with a couple of friends, and it was just as busy at 2am as it was at 2pm in the afternoon. It was fully lit up and it was strange to be there almost the middle of the night and it was still busy and bustling with people. We can also solve. We can. There's a sound of a city. I hope you heard that. We can also solve the big intractable issues of our communities. Here's a site that many people will remember, perhaps maybe through the movies, but this is Los Angeles. This is where Hollywood is in Southern California here. And during the 70s and 80s and even early 90s, people remember that. Los Angeles. Yeah, it's amazing city, a wonderful city. But there was a cloud of smoke of pollution hanging over the downtown area. It was famous for that. I mean, you can see it here in this picture. You can see the degree to which the sky is cloudy and gray, or it's cloudy with smog, not with actual water vapor clouds, but through innovation and persistence and good ideas. We moved away from cars that spewed leaded gas and we went to unleaded fuel and we implemented a thing called a catalytic converter. And from there you started to see less and less smoke. And today, and today, remarkably, the skyline of Los Angeles that you can see here is largely clear and blue skies on most days. That's an incredible journey. A really wonderful feat how we moved from a polluted city to a clean city just by taking the bold, innovative steps and taking some risks, too. We have to make those investments, we have to take those risks if we're going to change the game in the future of our communities. Now, what else is changing? What are Other good news stories? Well, I earlier talked about the state of the possibility that energy would be a significant part of the needs of our cities going forward. Look, as cities grow. We have now already over a dozen mega cities in the world. These are cities that are 10 million people and above. In fact, the city of Tokyo in Japan is over 35 million people strong. That's a serious urban area. And as these communities grow in many places in Brazil and across South America and Asia and India and other places, our appetite for energy is not going anywhere. We are getting more and more hungry for more energy to power all our digital devices and to power our downtown areas with huge LCD screens. And we need more electricity, but our electricity needs to be cleaner and more abundant. We cannot continue to harvest from the Earth coal, gas and oil the way we have been for the last century. We are doing that at a tremendous negative cost to our health and the health of the planet. It is the single biggest contributor towards this climate emergency, the emission of the exhaust of our carbon, our love of carbon. And so we need to move into a new day, a new transition, a new period of time when our focus is on non carbon energy generation. And the good news is we are at the start, we're at the beginning of a energy revolution that not only is changing how we think about energy, but it's changing the look and the behavior of our communities. Here in this image you can see the city of Freiburg in Germany. It's a city that is, as you can tell, very much embracing solar energy. And the solar energy requires all these solar panels. And many, many homes cover are covered with solar. Across this community on a few sunny days, nobody in this city pays for electricity. It really is free because it's abundant from the sun. And if it continues, some of these homes create more energy than they need and they're able to sell it back onto the grid and actually make a profit, actually make a profit from generating energy in their homes. Solar seems to be in the long term the winner here. But there are other forms of power that we have to be looking at and are growing in significance. We are looking at wind generation and hydro using water and thermal using heat beneath the surface. And we're also looking at a revival of nuclear perhaps in the societies that are ready to innovate and invest in those expensive but very effective, clean and high volumes of good quality energy. So as we move into the future and as we think about less carbon to protect the environment, and we want to be able to pay less for abundant energy, we're making this transition. And a lot of it is as we move towards non carbon is focused on electricity rather than gas heating and gas cooking and coal for energy production and also for heat generation. Electricity means that in some communities we'll move away from having heaters installed that are gas powered and move away from gas ovens. Now, some people may argue that they prefer those. And so we have to go through this debate and we have to figure out the right mix. There is no future scenario where there's no imminent future scenario. Within a few decades where we are purely non carbon, we have to have a mix. There will be coal, gas and oil in addition to solar and thermal and wind and others for some time. And we got to figure out the right mix to be able to reduce carbon emissions, but also get the kind of experiences that we want and to maintain power 24 hours a day the same way as we mostly do today. Our communities are incredible platforms for new technology. One of the most promising technologies is called the Internet of Things. You know about this. This is not only about the Internet is not just about connecting people anymore, but it's actually about connecting objects, connecting our thermostats in our homes to the Internet, connecting our TVs to the Internet, our dishwashers, our refrigerators. And we're also connecting a lot of objects in our urban landscape too. In many ways, cities present one of the greatest opportunities for the Internet of Things. As we put up these sensors, we're creating the sensorization of our communities. These sensors that are these little devices are connected to the Internet and they can capture data around traffic, around the environment. They can count things, they can detect air quality and doing much, much more. And the city context is really great. First of all, because we have the needs, we have the demands. There are so many things we have to solve that require these sensors. But also we have places, we have existing infrastructure where we can deploy these sensors and they can easily be disseminated around the community without much effort. Part of it is because we already have light posts like the one in the image here. It is a fixed acid. We can put the sensor up high. And these lights typically have power, maybe electricity coming to them. And often they even have telecommunication links. Now, power in telecom is not essential because many of these devices will be powered by solar. And the communications are typically, in the long term, are going to be wireless, but the infrastructure is excellent there. In this particular example, these sensors are doing many, many things. One of the things it's doing is determining whether a parking space is free. Or not. And it's not just for one parking space. It is detecting the availability of a parking space in an entire block. In the city of Palo Alto, where I worked for a very long time, the Internet of Things represents again a multi billion dollar annual opportunity. And in the long term, it'll be trillions of dollars. There will be sensors everywhere. Now, as we do that, we do have to be mindful, of course, of surveillance protections and of privacy concerns and cybersecurity concerns. I'm a big proponent of these and I don't talk about these technologies lightly. I don't talk about them in the absence of ensuring that we do the right thing and that we protect people when we are thinking through these opportunities and innovations. Let's go back to New York City again. New York City, being one of the great cities of the world, has a lot going on in the smart and sustainable space. One example that I like to share, to talk about how we can take existing older infrastructure and, and bring it up to the 21st century, is in a project that was ultimately called Link NYC or Link New York City. Now, New York City had tens of thousands, I think about 22,000 if I'm not mistaken, phone booths. And in a world without cell phones or pagers, people had to go to a public phone booth. And so there were lots all around New York City. Well, of course those days are over in that almost everybody has a cell phone or a smartphone. And so you had all these telephone booths that were sort of beat up and really not being used for anything. But they were in locations where there was power and where there was telecom connectivity, perhaps there was fiber under the ground or copper. So the idea was, let's go ahead and remove those old telephone booths that nobody uses and replace them with something more contemporary, something from the 21st century. And so they put in place these digital signs that would give information to New Yorkers and visitors. But these digital signs would also include things like free high speed Internet and free international telephone calls. And also a place to report emergencies and to seek city information to do all sorts of things. And here you can see it in my, in my picture. Here is an example of a Link NYC digital sign that you will see when you visit New York City anytime now, going forward. A great example of how we can move from old infrastructure. We can utilize that to create a better experience and a new experience for the 21st century. Now, it's not just about bringing old infrastructure and old ideas up to date. It's also about introducing new ideas. We have to think differently. The 21st century and the fourth industrial revolution doesn't allow us to remain in a 20th century mindset as we tackle our city problems. And they are enormous. As I've already pointed out, we need to have 21st century ideas for 21st century problems. And so we'll see things like robots and artificial intelligence begin to be integrated with our city landscape. Here, for example, you see an actual robot who's doing the job of security, and it's walking, it's walking. It's not walking, it's on wheels. It's moving around, you know, keeping an eye out for thieves and other items of public safety interest. This is a real robot in a real garage in the United States. So our landscapes are going to start to look different as we move into the future, as we have new ideas and we're bold and we're brave, we're ready to make the investment and try out new things. Our cities are going to start to look different. They're going to start to look different in the years ahead because there's going to be different capabilities being offered. They're going to have things like drones. The drones are coming. And it's not just drones in the sky for doing things like deliveries and housing inspections and putting out fires, making movies, all the things we can do with drones and we'll do more and more of in the years ahead. But it's also drones on the ground. Here you see a device called Starship. It's a real company doing deliveries in many cities in the world. It's just growing. It's. It's only beginning and it's, it's starting to roll out. There's some bugs to sort out, but the early results are very, very successful. And we can expect to see our city skies and our city streets replete with all types of drones. Now, that could sound unpleasant to a lot of people because perhaps there's noise and there's things to trip over and there's a hazard and it could be a problem with privacy. Yes, these are all true. These are all true. And we have to, as cities and communities and governments, we have to work through these issues and decide what we accept and what we don't accept. But it's inevitable that these drones are coming in some form and probably coming to your city pretty soon. In fact, during COVID during the pandemic, we've seen a huge increase in deliveries and the delivery economy. People are now getting everything delivered to the home, from medicine to food, to restaurant food, to, of course, all Sorts of products and services that they can get from major retailers and up and coming retailers online. So we are in a new era of delivery. And by the way, cities have to accommodate that. They have to build policies around what we call curb management. And that is, you know what happens if you have a narrow street and a big truck has to make a delivery. Do all the cars behind it have to wait? Do we provide a place for those trucks to park? Or when they park, are they only allowed to be there for a few minutes? And how will it be enforced? So lots of rules and new regulations and new design will come and are coming as a consequence of our love affair now with delivery. And this COVID pandemic is accelerating the innovation that was already underway. Now I'd be remiss if to talk about the future of cities if I didn't talk about the future of cars. The future of cars. I started my presentation with cars and now I want to come back to this topic. It's often said that the biggest and most impactful new innovation of the first 50 years of the 21st century is autonomous driving. Autonomous vehicles. Cars are going to drive themselves. And when they can drive themselves in a big way, when all cars are getting there, the implications are going to be significant. Our future cars will be autonomous. They will be connected, they will be electric. We are going to see the end of the combustion gas powered car and we probably won't own them. They'll be shared. Cars will be shared. Since vehicles of all types, from trucks to buses to cars and motorcycles, since these things represent such a significant component of our cities, when they all change, when they go to these new models, there'll be new requirements and we'll get new opportunities. In a self driving world, do we need traffic signals? Do we need stop signs? Do we even need the grid system? Do we need lanes? These are all questions we can begin to ask ourselves. And depending on the answer, we can design our cities differently. In years from now, cars won't be how we think about them today. They won't be two rows of seats with all four passengers looking forward. No, they'll be. There'll be rooms where we can do all sorts of new activities within everything from entertainment to health care and who knows what else. As we build an entire ecosystem of offerings and innovation related to autonomous vehicles, a new mechanism by which we can get from A to Z without participating in the driving of it and know that it'll be safe. When this happens, our cities will change. Our cities will evolve. This is part of Our collective future. And as I've been saying throughout my talk today, we can't just think of the world in which we live today. The difficulty with innovation, and as an innovator myself for many decades, is that we have to build solutions and think about a world that doesn't yet exist. Innovation isn't about building products for yesterday's marketplace or yesterday's problems. Innovation is about building new products and new solutions for the world of tomorrow, of next year, of three years, of ten years from now. That's what innovation is about. And that's difficult. And that's why not everybody can do it. And that's why sometimes when we innovate, we fail, because it's hard to predict. But we've got to do that kind of work now. We have more tools, more technologies. The cost of many things are dropping. The cost of sensors, the cost of batteries, the cost of materials. Many things are dropping. And because of innovation and evolving, that's allowing us to do new things. I didn't know that in my life I would be an investor in a flying car company. I am an investor in a flying car company. And perhaps in a few years from now, some of us will get the opportunity to call a flying car from our cell phone and it'll come and pick us up and bring us where we need to with speed and efficiency, without any congestion. And it'll rise above the city so it doesn't interfere with the place making that we're doing on the ground. It's my view that flying cars are coming and they may take the form of passenger drones. Passenger drones? We won't fly these things. I don't think we'll need licenses. We'll just step into them and the computer and the artificial intelligence will take us safely to our destination. Now, as I come to the end of my short talk today, I wanted to mention a few of the aspects of work that's been done in Brazil now, just like every other country in the world that's in a state of progress and is seeing a lot of new challenges, is growing rapidly. Brazil is certainly in that category and can be and is a major player in the world when it comes to pushing the envelope of the possibilities of innovation and urban innovation and smart cities. There are five cities that I'd like to call out. I don't mean to not mention the one you're from, but there are 5 cities in Brazil that are doing interesting things. I would say, based on my research, that Brazil is among the leading countries in the world who have Cities that are focused on smart and sustainable efforts, you are clearly on the journey with the rest of us. Nobody is ahead of the game here. Nobody has a monopoly on smart cities. Every country needs to do what they find necessary to create a better quality of life. And in fact, every community needs to have that dialogue. So what is happening in these major Brazilian cities? Well, in the city of Rio, which gets a lot of attention in terms of smart city activities, one of the projects that has been implemented in the last few years was the consolidation of their call centers and request systems. In fact, when the team was put in place to take a look at how services could be made more efficient, they discovered that there were over 100 phone numbers that were available to call for different services. Well, if you're a member of the Rio community, that's overwhelming. You don't know who to call. If you're the city itself, you need to have people answering phones. And all those systems have different backend systems, so they're reporting differently. There are different levels of efficiency. Efficiency. Well, the 1746 project. The 1746 project in Rio consolidated that into a central system. And today in Rio, most city services are rationalized into a central call center, web portal, and one or more smartphone applications. That is the definition of creating a more smart and digital community. In Sao Paulo, there's been a real strong effort to reduce bureaucracy in the city and the city services by implementing a lot of digital solutions and using new technology tools. So they've had some progress there, and that focus will ensure that there will be results as time goes by and we learn from our efforts. Let's jump to Bello Horizonte. And I apologize if I don't have the accent or the right pronunciation, but in this community, one thing, for example, they have, which is essential for every smart city, is a good digital infrastructure. And that means things like excellent Internet connectivity or at least the resource of having fiber underneath the ground. Well, the community of Bello Horizonte has 700 kilometers of fiber into the city, which is creating a very good platform for telecommunications, is clearly offering existing services for businesses and some homes, and hopefully it's a really good basis to build even more higher quality government services and offerings to the community. There's also a focus on startups. They realize that in this community, more startups need to be generating jobs, modernizing the economy and reaching for the opportunities of the 21st century. And we see that theme, by the way, throughout these. Throughout these cities, economics represents a core component of building smarter and more sustainable communities. And I'M going to jump to Vittoria here. Vittoria, hopefully again, I am pronouncing that correctly and I apologize if I'm not is in Vittoria. The government of that city has placed a very clear focus on building an innovation ecosystem and in particular really supporting opportunities for new startups. And there are many, many services for helping those startups begin. There are incubators and accelerators and different types of incentives for companies to be set up and contribute towards the digital economy. So I'll finish my few thoughts. I don't have my notes here on Curitiba, but if you want to look at another smart city example in Brazil, I would suggest taking a look at that city. Now, a couple of concluding comments on this list. First of all, smart city work is hard. It doesn't always succeed. And there's been a fair amount of criticism about some of these projects and some of these efforts. Sometimes we spend a lot of money and it doesn't get the result we expected. And communities as they should be, they're frustrated and critical that. But we have to do these things, even if sometimes they don't work. What happens? We learn from it. We learn from our mistakes. In some places, the cities and the city workers and even the community members were not ready to embrace the changes that were being introduced. And some areas there wasn't sufficient leadership to push through success. So while we can look at the amazing work being done in Brazil, and I'm ready to say overall it's a very positive start, remarkable new services being offered to these communities, we need to recognize the good news stories and we need to support people doing the tough work. But we also balance it with the challenges. These things are hard and we can learn from it. We make mistakes. So there is a ways to go. But certainly my conclusion is based on my research that Brazil has done excellent work. And certainly having smart cities and a smart country is well within the grasp of every community member in every city in the great nation of Brazil. Now, I hope you found what I've been talking about today interesting. Perhaps I cited something that for you was new. Maybe part of this inspired you. Perhaps you're ready to take action. You're ready to create a business, to be an innovator, to be an urban innovator. Maybe just as a community member you're ready to have more of a say, to have a voice, to be able to contribute in different ways. Everything from being a volunteer to sitting on a commission or sitting on a committee. Or perhaps you fancy yourself as a government worker or, or even running for office. There is so much opportunity, There is so much. We have so many needs to build better and more sustainable communities. And so I always like to leave my presentations with a question. And my question for you is, are you ready to build the cities of the future? Are you ready to help build the cities of the future? I certainly hope that your answer to that is yes. Now, as I wrap up here and conclude, I just want to share with you a recent publication I wrote. If you like this topic, if you're interested in the future of cities and you want to know how to do it, I have written the how to book. This is a comprehensive book on how to build smarter and more sustainable communities. The book is called Smart Cities for Dummies. It is part of the very, very popular Dummy series. But it's for everybody. It's for city workers, entrepreneurs, community members, it's for academia. It's really for everybody. And since I released it in July 2020, the book is an incredible success story. It's a bestseller in many lists and I hope that you'll check it out. If you'd like to buy a copy, you can find out where you can buy it in Brazil, going to smartcitybook.com smartcitybook.com or if you'd like me to sign and dedicate a book to you, I do that too. You can find the link to that in smart citybook.com just fill out a form and I will send you a book with a dedication to you. And hopefully it inspires you to take incredible steps to build our better cities. So I want to say thank you again. Thank you for the privilege. It's a wonderful privilege. Thank you to be able to address you. I'm so glad that you're attending this conference and if you're watching this video much later on, I hope there were some insights here that you found very, very interesting. Again, My name is Dr. Jonathan Reichental. You can reach me on Twitter, you can reach me on LinkedIn. I'm very accessible and I'd love to have a conversation with you. With that said, thank you and goodbye.