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International Conference promoted by the United Nations on the future of cities

PUSH, as an associate member of the World Urban Campaign and its initiative “I’m a City Changer”, has been selected to coordinate the organization of the first Urban Thinkers Campus in Palermo. City as a Service has been indeed one of the 28 campus selected by the United Nations with the aim of preparing the contents to be presented during Habitat III (Quito, 2016). The event took place in Palermo, at Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, October 8-­9-­10 2015.

The city conceived as a multifaceted integrated service should improve citizens’ lives by ensuring a real­time easy access to information. The use of technology, in the era of sharing economy, can trigger this process and foster economic and social growth. This topic has a crucial value in the city of Palermo and it represents a great opportunity to share innovative services as well as effective practices adaptable to other similar marginal contexts. The City as a Service Urban Thinkers Campus lasted 3 days and it has been conceived as an open space for workshops, seminars and networking moments aimed at sharing positive urban transformations. In each of the three days representatives of civil society, research, companies and public administrations contributed to the debate.

Around 100 participants per day took part to the event. More than 100 applications to the call for Urban Labs and Urban Thinkers Session proposals have been selected by a Steering Committee. 3 Plenary Sessions, 12 Urban Thinkers Sessions and 11 Urban Labs took place during the 3 days event. Great success even online: intense live tweeting among participants using the official hashtags #UrbanThinkers and #UTCPalermo and around 320 visualizations of the three plenary sessions’ live streaming. A report including all the issues raised during the event and the achieved results has been provided to the United Nations in order to enrich the Habitat III debate.

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