A digital smart city collaborative project aims to form a common resource for humanity’s largest urban centres and universities, which contribute 40% to 50% of global GDP. Called Cities ABC, the digital platform aims to unite cities, universities and citizens.
 
It was created by thought leaders and academics Dinis Guarda, Hilton Supra, Yu Xiong, Sally Eaves, Kiran Fernandes and Jamal Ouenniche, and more than 200 subscribers.
 
Every city needs to become a smart city, a smart society with a live digital platform where ideas, resources, technology, data and intelligence can be used. In light of the current global pandemic, city leaders and citizens are right to focus on dealing with the immediate coronavirus crisis, but what will help them rebuild both socially and economically in the future?
 
The aim of the project is to offer a simple-to-use, but powerful, integration platform that citizens, leaders, academics and policy makers can use to connect multiple Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), blockchain, IoT, AI (artificial intelligence) and fintech initiatives, so as to coordinate and support global recovery on a city-wide, social impact, decentralised and neutral basis.
 
The digital 4IR smart city collaborative project will form a common resource for humanity’s largest urban centres and universities, which contribute 40% to 50% of global GDP.
 
“We need a new Magna Carta for our greatest cities, a guide on how urban leaders and teams leading smart city transformation projects can best use technology to help their communities and their struggling citizens,” said Dinis Guarda, founder of the Ztudium big-data business intelligence network.
 
The Cities ABC project is urging every major metropolis to join this coalition network to become a live digital P2P platform where ideas, resources, data, technology, apps, research and intelligence, via their universities, can be used to take the world out of the expected catastrophic slump in the global economy after Covid-19 is beaten.
 
“Over half of the planet now lives in cities, and more than two-thirds of the world’s population will be urbanised by 2050, so the city is the true epicentre for all the challenges we are facing,” said Yu Xiong, chair of technology at Newcastle Business School and a fellow of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership in the UK.
 
The Cities ABC team is calling for multinational coordination of knowledge and resources, so that citizens, leaders and policy makers can quickly understand how to optimise, unite and support different stakeholder groups to find a new digital transformations global community that can create data-driven initiatives in healthcare, tackling Covid-19 issues, circular economic smart city narratives and resources to meet their particular needs.
 
“We created Cities ABC to be a digital transformation platform to empower, guide and index cities,” said Hilton Supra, a financial and investment fintech entrepreneur.
 
The team is also working across borders to build coalition networks and rapidly identify ways to work in healthcare, smart cities, education, edtech, finance, fintech and social empowerment models.
 
Cities ABC is backed by Tech ABC and Ztudium.