International conference on "Governance and Smart City Initiatives"
Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom (FNF) and Korea Local Information Research & Development Institute (KLID) recently co-organized an international conference on "Governance and Smart City Initiatives”.
The event was designed to allow participants to share best practices of smart city initiatives from Germany and Korea, with a special focus on interaction between different local actors and enhanced Smart governance. It also aimed to foster cooperation and knowledge exchange between these two countries in the field of smart city.
The first session was led by Prof. Marc Wolfram (Sungkyunkwan University), which dealt with German experiences; Dr. Chirine Etezadzadeh (President of SmartCity.institute) offered a comprehensive view on German smart cities, while Mr. Bernd Schlömer (Member of the Berlin State Parliament) explained political and social challenges to achieve smart cities in Germany. As for Ms. Julia Egenolf (City of Cologne), she introduced smart city project from her city, which was very interesting since it was created privately together with private partnership and all relevant stakeholders, rather than by the city government initiatives.
Meanwhile, the second session focused on best practices of Korean smart cities, and it was moderated by Dr. Sang-Baek Chris Kang (Director of Global Cooperation, KLID). Successful cases from Seoul Metropolitan government, Anyang City government and Songdo were presented by their officials; respectively by Mr. Chun-uk Kim, Mr. Jung-ho Yoon, and Mr. Sang-ho Lee.
The presentations from these two sessions clearly showed the difference between Germany and Korea in terms of smart city initiatives. While Korea, more generally Asia, has a very technical point of view on Smart City topics, Germany makes a social approach towards it, due to emphasis on the private date protection. This would mean that an exchange between Germany and Korea will be mutually beneficial since one can learn from the other.
Apart from the German and Korean cases, a successful Indonesian case was also introduced by Mr. Surya Darmadi (QLUE Performa Indonesia) during a special session. He presented on “Qlue”, a performance-base app that has greatly contributed to improve the quality of governance and administrative effectiveness in city of Jakarta.
On the following day of the conference, a field trip to TOPIS(Seoul Metropolitan Government Integrated CCTV control center) and to Songdo city was organized for foreign experts to get first-hand experiences on smart city services provided by Korean local governments.
