Barcelona is one of Europe’s most fascinating and cosmopolitan cities. It has been reformed in terms of construction, the economy and in social terms, to provide Barcelona with a high-quality environment to live and work in. It is not surprising that the city holds an annual exhibition on Smart Cities.

In the Expo2014, in parallel with the exhibition of products and services, there is a series of workshops and conferences on a wide variety of topics related to towns and cities in which world-renowned names in this field participate.

Compared to last year when we were also present, this exhibition seemed more interesting despite the majority of companies being multinationals with their own fantastic applications.

In the workshops, it was interesting to see the sharing of knowledge, codes and the attempt at normalization that already exists among many cities. Applications in big data are always present in Smart Cities and I was pleased to see various references to projects carried out in Lisbon (e.g. Helsinki is using a spot developed by Lisbon). This sharing brings benefits, as it gives a scale to the number of people reached, so reducing costs. I believe towns should collaborate as companies already do. An important point is that we usually only share successes, but more is learnt by sharing failures than best practices.

When we are working on a Smart City project, someone, somewhere else in the world, is doing exactly the same thing, or part of it. We should not repeat the mistake that other towns have already made. We learn together and should therefore collaborate. Never forgetting that what we do is for people, and only working together will we make this a really better world.