Spain is one of the world’s most advanced countries in the field of ‘Smart Cities’. It boasts the Spanish Network of Smart Cities (Red Española de Ciudades Inteligentes, or RECI), which includes the participation of the country’s major cities, a committee from Aenor (the Spanish Association for Standardization and Certification) and the platforms which support them.

It’s fair to characterize a smart city as one that uses technology in order to foster sustainability, the wellbeing of its inhabitants and economic development.

In Spain there are various examples of initiatives such as Smart Coruña, which was created by the city of La Coruna in northwestern Spain (Ayuntamiento de Coruña). This effort originated in order to position the city within the vanguard of smart cities, with a comprehensive vision that is centered on its inhabitants.

Other pioneering cities working on similar projects are Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga. These cities have always used a management model focused on their citizens and aimed at helping to solve the problems they face.

Spain has at its disposal the Spanish Network of Smart Cities, or RECI (Red Española de Ciudades Inteligentes) which includes the participation of the country’s major cities, a committee from Aenor that is focused on Smart Cities and the platforms which support them.

A smart city helps to make city management of infrastructure and urban services more automated and efficient, which in turn allows controlling government spending, improving the quality of services offered, giving citizens better information and allowing city managers to make better decisions.

Smart cities are growing in number, as they seek to improve efficiency and sustainability as well as bettering the organizational functioning of cities, all based on technology as an ally.

Em Tech España 2014, an annual emerging technology conference organized by the MIT Technology Review (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), will showcase the sector’s most interesting advances when it is held November 12th-13th at Valencia’s Palau Reina Sofía.

Smart cities are destined to become a fundamental tool that will help guide public policy in the forthcoming years.