ONE UN - Artificial Intelligence for Cities - Urban Planning and Building Smart, Resilient Communities (WUF13)

Good afternoon, Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to the UN event on Artificial Intelligence for cities, Urban Planning and Building Smart resilient communities.
To officially open the session, may I kindly invite His Excellency, Mr.
Samir Mamdov, Deputy Minister of Digital Development and Transport of the Republic of Azerbijan and Mr.
Cecil Ooy, the Director of IT Telecommunications Standardization Bureau to the stage.
Okay.
Thank you very much, sir, and dear colleagues.
It's a great pleasure to welcome you to this session cognized by International Telecommunication Union, ITU, UN Habitat, and the government of Azerbijan.
Today's discussion focused on a question that is becoming more and more crucial for urban development.
How can artificial intelligence, digital twins, spatial intelligence, and data informed decision making help cities become smarter, safer, more resilient, and more people centered? So during this event, we will connect global framework with real urban practice.
We will look at how cities are using evidence to improve housing importance, infrastructure resilience, mobility, public services delivery, and quality of life.
We will also discuss how trusted interoperable and inclusive digital system can help move urban innovation beyond isolated points and into scalable implementation.
The event will also showcase the United States smart Sustainable Sties UFO SIC initiative and the outcome of the third un virtual day which took place last week in Geneva.
To open this event, it's my honor to invite His Excellency, Mr.
Samuel Mundo to deliver his opening remarks.
Your Excellency Flo is yours.
Thank you very much.
Dear participants, guests of our city.
Welcome to Azerbijan.
Let me first of all, thank you for the interest to the forum this year and your visit to Azerbijan.
Modern governance demands proactive data driven solutions.
Hence, Azerbijan is systematically integrating artificial intelligence into its urban and regional development fabrics to build smarter, safer, and more adaptive community ecosystems.
By harmonizing national digital infrastructure, promoting high performance computing clusters, and cultivating localized AI talent, the nation is establishing the robust data architecture and regulatory framework required to spearhead regional technological transformation.
At the national level, Azerbijan has adopted a comprehensive strategic framework, including the action plan for 2026, 2028 years on accelerating digital development in the Republic of Azerbijan.
The action plan is built around four priorities, digitalization, AI, innovation ecosystem, and cybersecurity.
These priorities are supported by four enabling foundations, human capital, infrastructure, modern legislation, and effective governance.
The overarching objective of artificial intelligence strategy of the country encompasses accelerating AI advancement, fostering academic and empirical research, enhancing AI information systems, and their institutional management mechanisms, ensuring the availability of robust infrastructure, and strengthening qualified human resources capacity.
With priority sectors including energy sector, digital connectivity and mobility, community health, security, and therefore, robust broadband coverage, which is 100% fixed broadband at 95 megabits average speed, are strong digital infrastructure supporter for our country.
Data centers, government clouds.
The components provide the essential high speed data processing capabilities crucial for deploying AI power city services and advance some smart community initiatives.
To date, we have full coverage of fiber optic network.
Even in the most remote villages, we have fiber optic connectivity, and I would say this is probably about 99.5% and those villages that don't have access to fiber optic, they have similar access for wireless connectivity, similar speed and capacity.
The National AI Center and Academy in collaboration with leading institutions are developing a skilled workforce to create and manage AI solutions for community challenges, including the development of an Azerbijani language, large language model for public services.
Azerbaijan is positioning itself as a regional hub for artificial intelligence and data centers.
Across the Caucuses, Central Asia and neighboring markets, estimated demand is around 850 megawatts, while current regional supply is only around 30 megawatts.
This creates a significant opportunity for Azerbijan and the wider region.
Azerbijan offers strong comparative advantages for this transformation.
These includes more than 2 gigawatts of surplus power capacity.
A 10 gigawatts of green energy projects are under development.
Highly competitive electricity tariffs, strategic access to Central Asia, the Gulf, Turkey, and Europe, full national fiber optic coverage, as I mentioned before, and connections to major European Internet exchange points, and the digital silk road corridor.
To expand computing infrastructure, discussions are being conducted with leading global technology companies and hyperscalars.
In the long term, Azerbijan aims to host 30 to 50,000 GPUs on its territory.
Some of the recently planned AI use cases in digital twin development and smart transportation include the following.
At ANA, our Azerbaijan and Transportation Agency, the vision is to leverage the digital twin capability already being built today as the analytical foundation for assessing and prioritizing urban mobility initiatives.
By simulating interventions before they reach the street, from adaptive signal timings to corridor redesigns, the city could test, measure, and refine traffic flow improvements in a virtual environment, then translate the most promising scenarios into measurable reductions in conjunction fuel consumption and emissions.
At our state railroad company, ADI, which expanded its role along the middle corridor.
The ambition is to apply AI native solutions that draw on the rich operational data already generated by existing locomotives, track sensors, and signaling systems.
By layering modern AI on the top of this hardware data, ADI would be able to create predictive maintenance, smarter freight scheduling, and improved network capacity, unlocking value from infrastructure already in place with its sovereign foundations.
At Baku Metro, which already generates substantial operational and sensor data through its rolling stocks, station systems, and surveillance infrastructure, the vision is to apply AI native analytics to the existing data stream to better understand crowd dynamics, anticipate maintenance needs, and enhance station level safety journey.
Taken together, these directions across the organizations I mentioned reflect a coherent aspiration, not a collection of isolated pilots.
But a sovereign AI fabric for urban Azerbijan that builds on existing infrastructure and data and positions our cities as emerging benchmarks for AI enabled, citizen centered governance across the wider region.
Thank you for your attention.
Thank you very much, Your Excellency, for your remarks and for bringing this important discussion to Of 13.
And next, it's my pleasure to invite Mr.
Cesar Ooy to deliver his opening remark.
A noise sound Flores yours.
Good afternoon, everyone, and very warm welcome to you all.
Let me start by thanking ITU co organizer, U habitat, and the government of Azerbijan.
We highly appreciate your support and hospitality.
At this pivotal moment for urban development with nearly 70% of the world's population expected to rip in cities by 2050, it's so important that new technologies do the good we know they can.
New technologies are supporting evidence based planning and helping local governments allocate resources more effectively.
Digital twins are simulate decisions before taking action.
Public services are becoming more inclusive and better tailored to our needs.
Early warning systems are gaining new powers of prediction, helping us save countless number of lives.
In these areas and many more, artificial intelligence has become a powerful tool to drive smart and more sustainable urban development.
Past success with AI depends on governance as much as innovation.
We need trusted standards, sound data management, and interoperable systems.
Sanders create a common guage for innovation.
They help technologies to work together, but they also support career communication among companies, business partners, and governments.
That's more important now than ever.
Key technologies are covering very fast.
With well devised strategies, this convergence can bring new discharge layers to our cities with very meaningful outcomes for sustainable and resilience.
That's why just last week at the third UN Budget World Today, we issued a call to action outlining five priorities for C leaders.
Delivering global commitment locally, building trusted and inclusive systems, improving decision making through data and simulation, enabling responsible social and economic growth, and strengthening international cooperation and standards.
UN Budget World Day is supported by 20 UN partners because we see huge potential for new technologies to drive social progress.
We also launched a new executive briefing to help make us navigate new opportunities and challenges.
Today, we'll take a close look at some of these opportunities and challenges.
And I thank our expert speakers and moderators and everyone attending for your contribution to this important discussion.
Like every discussion IT organizes on smart cities, we focus on real world experience and impact of people's lives because we want to ensure that IT's work on standards and capacity development speaks meaningfully to your needs.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr.
Ay, for your remarks and for highlighting the importance of international standards and the role of digital technologies for cities and communities.
And many thanks once again to Your Excellency.
Now we will move to session one, and this session we'll explore how artificial intelligence is transforming urban planning and helping cities build safer, more resilient, sustainable, and inclusive communities.
And to guide us through this discussion, it's my pleasure to invite my colleague, Mr.
Fred Nahi, program coordinator at the ITU to moderate this session for read flow sees.
Thank you.
Thank you very much and good afternoon dear colleague.
It's my pleasure to moderate this session on AI for cities urban planning and building smart resilient communities.
The purpose of the city is to try to move away from broad promise of the AI to the practical realities of urban planning and to see how we can implement AI to bring real value to the cities.
We know the cities are already using data analytics, digital twins, predictive modeling, and AI enabled tools to understand urban systems, as policy choices, improve services, and strengthen resilience.
The key question is how these tools can be scaled and governed in ways that are trusted, inclusive, and align with local priorities.
We are fortunate to have three speakers who bring complimentary perspectives.
First, I'm pleased to welcome Mr.
Dmitri Atov, advisor to the Minister of the Government of Moscow and head of the Department of Information Technologies of Moscow.
Please.
Second, I'm pleased to welcome Matthew Bach, Director at clay, Please.
Third, I'm pleased to welcome Adina Matte, head of the Geneva Liaison Office at the United Nations Human Settlements Program.
Please.
I will first invite each speaker to deliver a brief presentation, and then we'll ask a few questions before opening the floor to the audience and we start from Mr.
Dmitry Atov, please.
The floor is yours for the presentation.
Okay.
Thank you, everyone.
My name is Dmitry Antov.
I'm coming from Moscow and I'm an advisor to the head of IT department of the Moscow government.
Russian is official language of the UN, but I'll keep speaking in English so that everybody will be on the same page.
So first of all, I would like to congratulate the UN Habitat, the government of Azerbijan, the ITU, and all the relevant agencies for hosting this event and for holding this discussion.
I would like to speak a little bit about trends and cases of the use of AI in the city development.
First of all, we understand that AI is the buzzword in IT community.
AI is everywhere, and now we are coming into a gentic era.
So we in Moscow try to not only follow trends, but also to set trends and to monitor trends.
So that's why we are trying to publish and to make our own research of trends, and we understand that there are three major trends in smart city development.
The first trend is using AI assistant.
Given the proliferation of generative AI of large language models, a lot of cities do their own AI solutions to communicate with the cities.
We have two great examples here on the slides, like Tam, the digital assistant in Abu Dhabi and Sheng xiao, this is the whole ecosystem based on deeps, a large language model in China.
What do we have in Moscow? We do the digital assistant, the Moscow digital systems.
It is also based on the Russian large language model that helps us the Moscow government to process messages and to do significant actions in the city where you can manage where you can use AI assistant to, for example, help you get city services.
We understand that the voice of the city city not only hears your voice, but city can talk back to you.
The city can speak with you using AI.
The voice of the city is not just a metaphor.
The voice of the city now can be heard in digital AI assistance throughout the world.
We in Moscow do this thing and we're developing the thing along with other global cities.
The second big trend is digital twins.
Basically, what is a digital twin? It is a digital tool to model and to predict and to manage all the decisions in a given sphere.
I like digital twins because for me, the digital twin combine all the three pillars of smart city, technology, data, and decision making because you can't manage big data without high technology, and if you don't use your data to make decisions, then this data is going to be wasted.
We are monitoring digital twins.
I'm proud to say that we have one of the biggest databases of digital twins in the world.
We have more than 1,200 specimens analyzed and dissected in this database, and we see different digital twin tools throughout the world.
I will concentrate on Moscow's digital twin because it is my passion and it is within my portfolio.
Moscow's digital twin is updated twice a year with aero photography.
This is a complete free model of the city augmented with 9,000 analytical layers.
We use AI to help us predict the outcomes of the decisions made by the mayor, made by the housing committees, made by tourism, Transport board, and other relevant authorities.
We use big data to predict the needs of the citizens.
We use big data to plan the city development.
We even use generative AI to plan for new city districts and for new city blocks where things that we're planning that took months and dedicated teams of architects now take five or 10 seconds of AI generation and AI solution.
It is all based on big data and on existing data on existing data on underground communications, on sewage water pipelines, traffic, and so on and so on and so on.
AI can help you plan and make decisions regarding city development.
The third trend of AI implementation in smart cities is video analysis.
Computer vision is a big technology ranging from health care, medical imaging analysis to security to other things that can be used with AI if you have a big CCTV system.
I'm going to see I'm going to speak about Moscow's case where we use video surveillance systems for different purposes.
One of them is to make the city safer because we understand that a smart city is a safe city and we use a lot of things to make our city safer.
Just for an example, Moscow is a very big city and last year we had less than 400 car thefts in Moscow.
In the last 15 years, we have decreased the number of bulglaries in Moscow apartments by 46 times.
You can use AI to make the city safer, but you can also use AI to monitor the city.
To see if the garbage bins are full, if the street lights are working, if your road signs are dirty or not.
We use it and we save time and we save effort.
We save time and we help people to get to live in as comfortable city as possible.
To wrap up my presentation, I would like once again to thank the ITU and Mr.
Anaya for his initiative for United for smart and sustainable cities.
Moscow's got its certificate two years ago, and we understand that the a smart city should be managed using different areas and different domains of measurement.
That's why we in Moscow are trying to move from smart city concept to wise city concept.
You should be wise.
You should use wisdom to know when to implement technology, why to implement technology, and what to do with this technology so that all the effort and all the data would not be So we are trying to implement a wise city framework, welcoming innovative, social involved, and so on and so on and so on.
A lot of things that can be used here in smart cities.
Once again, AI is a buzzword, AI is a trend, but moreover, AI is a game changer for the cities.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much, Dmitri, for your very inspiring presentation.
Let me invite our next speaker, Mr.
Matthew Bach, for the presentation.
The floor is yours, please.
Great.
Thank you.
Hi, everyone.
Thank you for the invitation.
It's good to be here today with all of you.
I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the work we've been doing in relation to GOAI together with you and habitat and other colleagues also.
But before I get started, I just want to say a few words, if I can get this right, there we go.
A EC we're a global network of local and regional governments.
We work with over 2,500 cities and towns and regions across the world through 27 or so offices.
I'm the regional Director in Europe, and so my team has then been doing a lot of this work.
I'm here also speaking on their behalf.
They do the hard work, I do the talking.
Um, we've been doing a number of different initiatives across climate, biodiversity, nature based solutions, mobility, and so on and so forth, and our work on green digital transformation has been a very rapidly growing area, which is then anchored in a lot of work around AI, including on EU frameworks like, of course, the AI Act, the Digital Europe Program, and so on and so forth, but also alignment with key standardization initiatives like from SENSE and II and all that, but also ITUT study group five on the climate impacts of ICTs, which is a really important question currently.
Our portfolio goes through research and innovation, impact through an action fund which we deployed with support from google.org in a number of European cities, capacity building as well through the AI Opportunity Fund and two flagship toolkits as well.
These are the responsible AI toolkit for urban climate action, it translates responsible AI principles into practical guidance.
You're warmly invited to come and have a look at this when we present it further at the European Urban Resilience Forum in Qimarj, Portugal mid June.
Then the focus of today, the GO AI toolkit for Urban planners, which we then developed with UN Habitat and has been published in January.
So I'll try to present the toolkit briefly, but I do encourage you, of course, to have a look at the whole material because it is, in my opinion, also quite interesting.
It really aims to provide practical guidance to urban planners because this is something that they're very much missing at the moment.
They don't really understand how do we actually do this work with AI from an urban planning perspective.
So there's a real gap that's trying to be filled here.
It's especially a big gap if we look at smaller and medium sized cities because they lack the skills, the quality data, and the guidance to really integrate Go AI into their everyday work.
It's been a whole process of desk research consultations, validation workshops, peer reviews, and so on and so forth, and so it's really there to help, as said, urban planners, decision makers, but also national ministries and technical partners to move forward at pace.
Some of the foundations are, and for those of you who are not so familiar, GAI is basically geospatial analytics combined with artificial intelligence.
It's nothing very mysterious, but it is something very powerful.
It basically applies AI techniques to spatial data and mapping workflows, which is something that cities really need.
Um, so There are three key trends that I'd like to speak to here.
I think there's one in terms of research where we see a lot of new models and methods emerging very quickly, and I think the colleague here spoke to that.
The second one in the private sector, we see the market expanding extremely fast with an increasing integration of digital twins.
Then at the city level, we do see this growing engagement with urban planning as an AI application field as well.
So I think there's a bit of a move from piloting, which has been what's been happening in a lot of cities for quite some time now into a real operational practice, and that's a real change that cannot be underestimated.
So in the toolkit, we look at five key areas of application.
We're talking about land use housing and infrastructure, so closest to the topic of this this time, urban basic services.
Here we're talking about traffic forecasting, energy demand modeling, also then the whole administrative side of things, and disaster management and climate resilience, and last but not least, public health and safety.
We've worked across 12 documented cases in ten cities and regions and I can't take you through all of them.
We'd run out of time, but there are a few good examples worth mentioning.
One is beam or Establishment automated Mapper.
It's been developed by UniTAk with UN Habitat, and it looks at how AI can be used to rapidly map the buildings footprint from an aerial and satellite imagery.
Basis.
This is particularly important because it helps then to find how we can distinguish formal from informal structures and fill some of these data gaps that occur in a significant portion of the world.
Another example worth mentioning has to do with AIP climate vulnerability mapping, which has been done by the city of Barcelona.
In Turkey, they're doing building damage detection using AI.
In DRC doing property mapping for tax reform.
The list goes on and on and there are many exciting examples, so do have a look in the toolkit.
So there are a lot of opportunities.
I know we like to talk about the risks of AI, but I think I'll start with the opportunities, and these have to do with really having access to much more adaptive data driven decision making.
It helps us to do better forecasting, scenario planning, also through the digital twins, for example, increasing our operational efficiency, which is crucial for local governments who face constraints in terms of their capacities and resources.
And then also, of course, fair participation from different communities.
This opens up new worlds of how do you have the voice of citizens heard in your planning processes.
But there are definitely challenges in terms of limited technical expertise.
This is something that we're, for example, working on as EC and trying to do a whole training process for different civil servants in the broader European context.
There's a big governance challenge and here, I agree very much with Mr.
Ohms as well, that governance is one of the key challenges that we have to address in AI.
There's a big technical one in terms having access to high quality data because, of course, if you base it off of bad quality data, then you're going to get bad quality results.
Of course, the environmental one we should not ignore, which has to do then with the energy use, carbon emissions, and so on and so forth.
We're not also fortunate as Azerbijan to have such a surplus of available energy.
It's something that we then need to pay attention to in moving forward with AI.
Um, so in the toolkit, we look at basically five phases or pillars for this integration, moving from assessment through setting a foundation, deployment, monitoring, and replication.
So it's important to have for cities to have a structured process when integrating GOAI into their work, so it's not a one off type initiative here.
There's also in the toolkit, step by step guidance, which goes through 12 steps across five phases.
Everything from problem identification through data preparation, prototyping, alignment, and so on and so forth, these are all steps that really should be undertaken if you want to have a responsible and basically practical use of GOAI in a city.
So I'm not going to go through all the details, of course, because that would take much too long.
But I would like to close in mentioning something that toolkits like this are very important.
There are 1 million toolkits out there.
I know you've probably seen far too many, but they do really help to help us move forward and understand how to do this.
There's also a lot of hard work that needs to go alongside the use of a toolkit.
This means creating the partnerships to get the work done institutionalizing the governance structures, doing the capacity building, and going beyond that.
Then the last word that I would like to say in closing is I'd like to thank my team that's done all this great work together with you and habitat, Alice, Daniella and Tanya who could not be here today, unfortunately, but you've got their email addresses on the screen and you're very welcome to contact them or speak to me if you'd like to have more details, and also, we'd like to thank all the partners from the different institutions with whom we've worked so well over the past period.
There you go, you get a few pictures to imagine all the lovely people I get to work with on a day to day basis.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Matthew, for your valuable work and for your input to the ID standardization activity is much appreciated and let me invite our next speaker, miss Ali Matte for the presentation.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you also ITU, for the invitation and for the co organization of this great session.
Thank you also to my fellow speakers here, my great friends.
It's a pleasure to be here with you.
I would just navigate a bit of the work of you HD on what relates to the development of technology, smart cities, the role of AI and why this topic is so timely for the discussion today.
Just It should be working.
It was working before.
Can you just now it's working super.
Digitalization is nowadays one of the big mega trends that we have.
It's reshaping every aspect of human life from governance to education to health across different sectors to climate action.
But it's not only a technological shift, it's also associ change.
Yet, what we have been observing is that this transformation is still uneven and we have different gaps in terms of access to technology, also capacity that we need to advance.
As part of this process of acknowledging and recognizing the role of technology and digital transformation, the UN has been developing different initiatives.
So here I just brought two of them to mention to you, one is the Global Digital Compact and the other ones the Pact for the future.
As part of the Global Digital Compact, I would like to take a moment also to invite you because this week on Thursday, we are going to have the meeting of the mayors for Digital Compact.
It's a global alliance that was developed by UN HPTA together with other UN agencies, including ITU, ODE and others to advance the work and the implementation of this Global Digital compact.
And finally, of course, the Pact for the future that's quite aligned with digital governance and the 2030 agenda.
Now, but why smart cities? The backdrop that we have for smart cities nowadays relates to the privatization of public infrastructure, to the trust in public institutions, to the fact that many cities have become test beds to advanced solutions that sometimes that they are not even regulated.
We also have observed the many threats related to cybersecurity, to privacy, to surveillancey, in addition to that, what we observe is that the Internet of things has created new opportunity to digitalizing infrastructure, but has also introduced a lot of new vulnerabilities.
There is also, as I mentioned before, a persistent digital device and also the AI and misinformation is on the rise.
When we look at the global perspective with 2.8 billion people without access to adequate housing, which is the topic and the reason why we're here today, and 1.1 billion people living informal settlements in slums, the use of technology is even more important.
Of course, in addition to that, I know you're quite aware of these numbers by now, by 2050, we're expecting to have almost 70% of the world's population living in cities.
The global housing crisis, if it's not tackled, just going to increase and rise with the challenges ahead.
But what is one of the challenges that we have when we talk about smart cities? It's really to change the focus to move from this tech focused approach to a need drived approach, to focus on people, to have technology as a means to an end and not trying to find a problem that you have a technology that you want to use to solve.
Now, when we talk about smart cities, what it means? Here I brought to you what is the definition of a smart cities according to UN Habitat.
It's people centered, it's focused on improving people's quality of life to a the sustainability and resilience of the environment, while also fostering shared prosperity and inclusion, it's focused on ensuring that smart city innovations are developed through participatory approaches and collaboration, providing equitable access to digital services, skills, and infrastructure, especially for people in vulnerable population.
Now, one aspect that is important is the following.
Um, based on this need and acknowledgment that digital transformation has a key role in advancing and tackling the urban challenges, UN Habitat has launched in 2020, the People Center Smart Cities Program, and as part of this program, we have been working on three mainstreams.
One, of course, global advocacy, to advance the focus and mainstreaming of technology to people to serve to people, to improve people's lives.
The second, to increase the capacity building and technical assistance.
You're going to see a concrete example in a minute of an initiative of UN Habitat.
Then the third one related to financing digital urban innovation and how we need to increase investment and financing for people centered smart cities approach.
This program is nowadays a fundamental part of the implementation of the new strategic plan of UN Habat that is focused on housing, land, and basic services.
Here, I want to bring to you because of the topic that we're discussing today, one concrete example that is UTAk that's the United Nations Innovation Technology Accelerator for cities.
It's a digital facility that was developed by hafta together with OICT and the Hafen City University.
It's based in Hamburg in Germany, and it's a partnership funded by the German government by BMSet.
Basically, what the accelerator does is advancing the development of technologies based on AI, participatory digital governance, innovation for urban planning, mapping and spatial analysis, and also open and transparent and people centered approach.
Uh, the projects are implemented all over the world.
So we have projects in Central America, in Africa, Eastern Europe, and also Asia Pacific.
Um Basically, what UTAk does is that it operates as a Haptat digital facility, so it supports the implementation of the strategic plan.
It works with different country and regional offices all over the world.
Haptat nowadays is present in more than 90 countries, so almost 100 countries and also contributes, of course, to the implementation of the SEG 11 to strengthen the urban data system and in collaboration with other areas, of course, of UN Haptat.
This is quite aligned the work of Unank is quite aligned with the implementation of the new strategic plan.
There are different streams, but based on the focus that we have here, we'll focus more on the digital mapping and spatial analysis.
We have been developing at this facility AI driving and osatial data analysis.
We saw the example of bin.
I will also mention it in a few minutes, the GAI toolkit that was developed in collaboration with a E Clay.
But all this work is done also in partnership and within the United Nations system.
We have strong collaborations with ITU.
We have a recent MOU that was signed and we have an action plan.
We work with UTA and UniSA to help us with the mapping of informal settlements and different partners that we have.
How do we work? We basically develop um, a package, a toolkit that supports with the development of strategies.
Once we identify the urban challenge, we advance with the use of digital tools, and finally, we support the development of capacities and the development of capacity goes since the highest level of city leaders until the technical level.
This week we are also going to have a training for mayors that is going to be provided on Thursday that is to support how you can develop a smart city strategy.
How can you advance the digital tools, which kind of digital tools that you can use for the challenges that you're facing? Also, for example, if you want to use AI, how you can use AI to advance the decision making process.
Here, I will not detain myself a lot, but just to reinforce what we heard from Mi Clay We have this project that's been, it's a digital tool that's based on AI.
It map informal settlements basically mapping building and footprints using satellite images.
What it does, it helps to accelerate mapping process and provision of data.
For example, in the case of being in a In Iikini, we were able to reduce the mapping of informal settlements from eight months to 72 hours.
We have advanced a lot of work also on mapping formal settlements.
We are going to hear a bit more.
I see that our executive director just arrived about the work that we have been doing.
Here are just more three examples, and then I'll conclude so that we can hear from our executive director.
So we have also been advancing the development of digital tools to improve basic services.
We have a project in giza that is related to advancing access to water, informal settlements in Somaliland.
We also have developed a digital job card that's an initiative that's implemented informal settlements in Namibia.
We have been working five towns there.
And in addition to that, we have also been working on crisis response.
So we have developed an urban recovery system to support the recovery in Ukraine.
So it has been a project that has advanced so far.
And finally, participatory process.
So we have developed a new tool with the government of Brazil to support the development of the strategy 2050.
And this has been advancing.
It was implemented in more than 13 states to advance the strategy that they have, and now they are also going to use this in the municipal plans and in Rio de Janeiro to advance the mapping of informal settlements as well to collect feedback from the work in slams and so on.
So here I will pass just to show you, we are going to share with you we brought here.
My colleagues are going to share with you the bookmarks.
You have access to all the knowledge products of UNH that is available for you that you can also check.
My colleague already mentioned the AI to it, the step by step guide that we have, and also some of the solutions that we have developed.
I thank you very much.
I will stop here so that we can proceed.
Thank you.
Thank you very much and I can invite all the speakers to keep seated here.
Now, do you want to make an announcement or I can.
Now we have the honor to invite miss Anna Claus Rosaba, Executive Director of U Hib and the United Nations Secretary-General.
Thank you.
It's an honor for us to have you at our event and the floor is yours.
Thank you so much.
Good afternoon, Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, friends, partners.
Let me start thanking our partners in this event, International Telecommunication Union and the government of Azerbijan for bringing us together.
This is a critical discussion for UN Habitat.
Have been hearing in the past days about the urbanization challenges that we have being a critical one, the global housing crisis.
We have to build houses.
The many houses built in our cities are not working for all.
We have people 1 billion living in informal settlements, homelessness, et cetera This is all happening in the context of climate change.
Um, that is bringing extra disruption for the lives of people living in cities.
As we just saw two days ago here, like an unpredictable scenario required us to be resilient and react quickly.
So just to say that cities being at the front line of the context of climate conflicts that we are facing right now and with citizens struggling to have a roof, we really needed to max out the technologies that we have available.
There's no other option.
This is very well stated at the pact for the future that was agreed back to back to the UN General Assembly two years ago.
The future is digital.
We are all going through as we speak this digital transformation.
We need to make sure that what we have available works uh, for the people and people are increasingly living in cities and suffering from the several aspects.
I want to say that the work around digital tools, smart cities is pretty much aligned with our strategic plan.
We have been developing a body of work and work with member states, working now within the UN system, we have an MOU with ITU that we pretty much value on generating guidance on how to really work around this idea of smart cities of technology in cities.
We're very grateful for this pooling of resources to bring this guidance.
But the most important thing of our work is that smart cities, they really need to be people centered.
And place human rights at the center, inclusion, equity.
This is the central central actually aspect of our work and the guidance.
There are many practical examples and illustrations and I think Ali just went through our collaboration, our areas of work, one specific area of work program is our collaboration with staff and University of Hamburg through the UTAC program that she just presented where we have developed tools to support local governments, national governments to information about cities.
But also to strengthen participation and governance, which is one also of the means of implementation of our strategic plans.
We want housing at the center informal settlements, but it needs to be done in a participatory manner, multi level governance, and these tools, they help us to achieve what's there.
In our plan, but not only that, they have been there all throughout the New Urban Agenda since it was endorsed ten years ago in Quito, Ecuador.
As we also shared in other conversations at this W forum, we had a ministerial roundtable, which is exceptional connected to the process of reviewing the New Urban Agenda at its midterm in New York.
We cannot think about the ten years of the New Urban Agenda with cells thinking how technology can help us doing that, how the digital transformation, what role the digital transformation will play.
What are the examples? One critical example also is related to the informal settlements.
As we speak, people living in very extreme vulnerable conditions are lacking access to the basic, to water, to sanitation, to electricity, connection to the city, connectivity, they are out when we had the pandemic.
The first out of the system where the people living informal settings because they just cannot work from home or study from home.
There's no connectivity.
They are excluded.
And so it's an urgent matter that we need to tackle.
A Ale was also just describing, we have been using technology to support the process of mapping informal settings because without this information, Mayors cannot act upon it, cannot design urban plans that integrates informal settlements in the planning in the city and also national governments cannot plan the investment plans.
Utilities cannot plan the extension of the services and the possibilities that they have.
This year, also in New York, we are reviewing SDG 11.
And we've seen SDG 11 SDG 11.1 talks about informal settlements, and we just discussed in another session the difficulties that governments face, communities face in mapping these informal settlements for several reasons, location, complexity, et cetera, and the rapid transformation.
So it's critical that we, we access technology, AI to build actually a coalition to map.
This is the initiative we just met the global Urban Data Coalition coming together, making sure that we connect our resources to map the informal settlements at the global level and support the monitoring of the SDG 11.
But also in urban planning, There are many technologies that are there, spatial intelligence, digital twins.
In basic services, we have been using, I Sali mentioned also some examples on how to avoid waste, waste of water, how to improve the connection of services and climate action.
I just spoke about the rain.
That happened here, we need to prepare, we need to react.
The governance we spoke about.
Yes, we need to work with cities and for that, the partnerships and alliances that we have around cities like the Mayors for Digital Corporations, together with UN Office of Digital and Emerging Technologies and the United smart sustainable cities so important.
This alliance has developed KPIs that have been utilized for more than 200 cities.
So Just to say, these collaborations are already generating results and cities have their in hand, but we still need to scale up.
Wolf is critical and all the global events where we can come together, they are critical for that.
But in doing that, we have to be very serious about ownership, about transparency, about ethics, about participation, about interoperability, and about standards, about security, and what is critical at the end of the day is that we build trust.
The Through all these alliances, collaborations and partnerships, we can make sure that we can work with each other to generate public goods and to address people's needs and human rights.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Mr.
Rob.
Since I have the microphone, thank you very much on behalf of the ITU for the excellent cooperation that we have with you and Habitat.
If I may also ask you to stay just for 1 minute to make a photo with all the speakers and with the leadership of the Minister of Digital Development and ITU.
Thank you once again.
With this, we come to the end of our first part of the session.
I guess I need to give the floor to my colleague anin for the continuation.
For the second part of the session.
Now we Thank you very much, Ali, and also thank you very much for the speakers of session one.
Now it's my pleasure to invite Ali to moderate Session two.
Thank you, colleagues.
Thank you.
Now we are moving to the second panel.
We're moving out to the discussion on AI spatial intelligence, and the city verse, shaping the future of cities and communities.
We are going to have two.
It's okay.
Two honorable speakers.
We have Ii Thao from ITU.
She's a junior communication officer and we have Nicholas Yu as extive Director of the Gang zu Institute for Urban Innovation.
So good afternoon again, everyone.
It's a pleasure that we're going to continue together.
So cities around the world are entering a new technological area, as we saw earlier today.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly converging with spatial intelligence, digital twins, immersive platforms, and real time urban data.
Together, these technologies are beginning to transform how cities are planted, managed, and experienced.
And they offer new ways to stimulate urban growth, strengthen resilience, improve services, support desires preparedness, and create more participatory forms of governance.
But alongside these opportunities come important questions that we're going to discuss today.
How do we ensure these technologies are trusted and inclusive? How do we avoid fragmented digital ecosystems? How do standards and interoperability help cities scale innovation responsibility? And finally, how do we ensure that technological transformation remains centered on people and communities? To explore these questions, I am delighted to welcome our two speakers bringing both global and practical perspectives to the discussion.
First, Ying Zhao, who has been closely involved in ITU work on AI, virtual worlds, digital twins, and the City verse, including the recent very successful third UN Virtual Words Day that took place last week.
And second, Nicholas, a globally recognized urban expert working on innovation, governance, and sustainable urban development, and a previous former colleague from UN Habitat as well.
So I would first like to invite Ein to deliver her presentation.
Ein, please, you have the floor.
Thank you again, Alan and distinguished participants.
In this presentation, we will speak about how artificial intelligence, spatial intelligence, and city works can support cities in becoming more resilient, inclusive, and people centered.
So as you may already heard from many presentations at this event, cities are facing many interconnected challenges, and I will not repeat it here.
But what we wanted to highlight is all those challenges on housing climate resilience connectivities, spatial inequality, they are interconnected and they cannot be resolved in isolation.
And so that's why we think the international standards are very important.
So it helps to turn nations into the scalable action for housing resilience and basic services.
So it helps cities the different systems in the cities to speak with each other and to tackle the challenges together.
And so from this slide, I will be talking about how ITU can help ITU, the International Telecommunication Union, as many of you may know, is the United Nations Specialized Agency for Digital Technologies.
And in addition to this role, ITU is also one of the standard development organizations together with IEC and ISO and ITU has its 194 member states and also in addition to the countries they do have more than 1,000 members, including companies, universities, research institutes, and the international organizations.
Bring together all these members, we do have a lot of work that are very relevant for cities and communities.
So within ITU, one of the leading group is ITT Study Group 20.
This is the group on IOT, digital twins and smart sustainable cities and communities.
This group really brings a variety of expert from very diverse background to working on the international standards for cities.
As of now, there have been more than 200 international standards published by this group and it is dedicated for cities and all standards are freely open to all So the work of this group included areas like Internet of things, digital twins, digital services, and also smart, sustainable cities and communities, including energy management, digital agriculture, and digital health related to IoT and smart cities.
And also recently has started working on AI enabled cities.
IT is actually the leading study group within ITU on this new area.
This is one of the example of ITU standards.
For example, for ITU recommendation wide 4201 on high level requirements and reference framework of smart city platforms, it really helps cities to connect the different services for housing infrastructure and essential services.
This recommendation was developed by a group of global expert and has been implemented in many cities.
And of course, the the urban system is very complicated, and that's why ITU, together with OS the expert from OAS has developed the standards wide do 4505 minimum interoperability requirements for cities and communities.
The standards really provide the minimum requirement for the different platforms in cities to top with each other.
So it's especially important for the cities which have limited capacity and limited budget.
To start to implement the standards.
As the standards are very aligned with the UN agenda.
For example, the definition of smart sustainable cities is contained in world IT standards, and also with the great collaboration with UN habitat actually, this definition of smart sustainable cities has also been referred to the UN Habitat resolution on international guidelines on people and smart cities.
So we have talked about several standards, how it is implemented in cities in real life, the one on the screen is one of the very concrete example.
This is recommendation wide 4903 on key performance indicator for smart sustainable cities and communities.
The standard has been implemented through the UFO SSA initiative in more than 250 cities, and this was also highlighted by the Executive Director of habitat in Hurricane notes.
So this KPI really provide a set of indicators to help city to assess the performance related to economy, environment, and society and culture.
And on the screen is the collection methodology for this key performance indicator which was developed based on the international standards and also in collaboration with UN habitat and many other UN entities.
This information is available on the IT website and it's free for all to find out the methodology.
So this standard has been implemented in different cities really regardless of the size or regions from Poly in Switzerland to Dubai and to B in Ghana.
And it helps cities to track progress on housing services infrastructure, and also it helps to check the progress towards SDGs.
So the picture on the screen is what the picture taken in 2024 during the global standards symp hold by ITU and the cities who participated in this program was highlighted in that picture, including Mexico, which was highlighted by Dimitri in his presentation.
This is one of the main outcome of the KPI project.
It's a view to really give a holistic picture for cities to show the progress in different areas.
This is the view of city of Ch B, and this is the one for the city of Kito and this is the one for city of Geneva.
As you can see, this is really implemented in the cities from different region of the world and also for the cities in different sizes.
If your cities are interested in this program, please feel free to reach out to us.
You can also find all these reports available at IT website.
So we mentioned that this project is implemented through EOSSC.
What is EOSSC? This is a global UN platform coordinated by ITU UN habitat and UNSAE and supported by 20 UN partners as shown on the screen.
Actually, this year is the ten year and it's the ten years since its establishment of this initiative.
And for this initiative, it works through its thematic groups on Currently, the initiative we have the thematic group on artificial intelligence in cities and digital public infrastructure DPI for cities, digital transformation for people centered cities and city platform and datasases and future foresight for cities to really explore the future read cities and also the athmatic group on social cultural sustainability in people centered cities governance and sustainable digital transformation in buildings and energy.
So one of the outcome of this groups are some publications really provide practical guidance for cities on the screen is one of its publication.
On this slide, we are showing more publication which was launched in recent years, including building DCI for cities and communities.
This one has provided a strategic framework really for city leaders in this area and also there is the guiding principles for artificial intelligence in cities.
Just earlier this year, we have launched the guidelines for cities to achieve carbon net zero through digital transformation.
All these deliverables are freely available on the UFO SSC website.
We also have a QR code on this slide where you can find all this information, including the KCI project and these publications.
So on this slide is actually a slide which one of the note speaker used during the UN virtual the Acan gallery.
This one shows the five trends in the next arrow including world models, agentic AI, physical embodied AI, AI native virtual worlds, and digital trends and immersive collaboration.
So attitude gather partners are also looking in those forward looking areas.
For example, just last week, I together with UN habitat and 20 UN entities has hosted the third UN Virtual Word.
The theme of this edition is AI Spatial Intelligence and City shaped interested digital future.
During those events, they had ambassador roundtable which gathered six ambassadors speaking in the round table and also more than 20 ambassadors attending the round table.
And there were two main outcome from this event.
One is the launch of the executive briefing on AI spatial intelligence and the AI enabled states, which was developed with the contribution from 20 UN partners, and another one is the launch of the call for action for humanity.
And as mentioned by Mr.
Anoi in his opening remarks, there were five strategic priorities highlighted in this call to action and now it is shown on the screen, including delivering global commitment locally, building trusted and inclusive AI system, improving decision making through data and simulation in urban responsible economic and social growth and strengthen international cooperation and standards.
This code to action was endorsed by the participants of the UN World World at the closing ceremony and they now submitted to World Urban Forum 13 as an informed document for your consideration.
And our work doesn't stop here at the UN Virtual World.
Actually I together with USAA and Digital Dubai has launched the global initiative on AI and virtual world discovery in the city world.
Now this initiative is supported by more than 70 partners to really explore the convergenc of AI, spatial intelligence, digital twin, and immersive technologies and for cities and communities and on screen is the three key pillars for actions, including strategic guidance, scaling framework evaluation and assessment, and many others.
The second civ assembly, which is the annual assembly for this initiative actually just took place last week following the UN virtual Word and it was cognized by ITU European Commission and O UIAC the outcome document of this assembly was collaboration on global standards for AIA board Cs.
This outcome document is available on the website and you are welcome to find more information.
This initiative are also a delivering a lot of reports including the AI enabled city use case taxonomy and also the guidelines to make sure no one leave behind in the cables.
Also, there were two deliverables launched just last week, including a strategic blueprint for cities in the age of AI really provide the vision for this new area and also the city leaders field guide preparing for AI enabled cables, which I believe Nicholas will provide more information in his presentation.
So that part concludes my presentation.
Thank you very much, A.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
I think your presentation highlighted very well how rapidly AI, spatial intelligence, and immersive technologies are moving from emerging concepts into practical tools for cities and communities.
We also very much welcome the call to action for humanity that was endorsed during the UN Virtual Worlds Day.
We are very thankful for that.
But without further delay, I would like to invite Nicholas to deliver your presentation.
Please, you have the floor.
Thank you very much and thank you, ITU for having me here.
My colleague just mentioned that one of the two documents that was launched last week was a guide.
My presentation today is focusing on that guide.
I'm not going to talk about AI and cities per se, but I'm going to talk about a tool that can help cities navigate their way forward using AI and digital tools.
So, my name is Nicholas.
As mentioned, I work for the Guangzhou Institute for Urban Innovation, which is an institute that is specialized on looking at how we can foster innovation in cities, be it on the governance level, be it for business models, be it for strategies and policies, or for action plan.
I want to mention from the start that I was one of 60 or 70 experts working on this guide and that there were two principal other co authors, and those co authors, I want to acknowledge them here today.
One of them was Christina Zung from the Metaverse Institute in London and the other one was Dino Del Accio from the UN Joint Staff Pension Fund.
They did a lot of the heavy lifting for preparing this guide.
So why did we develop this guide? First of all, this was an initiative of the IT virtual world Secretariat.
They're working on several parallel tracks, and one of them was to come up with a tool that could help cities quickly assess their capacity to go forward.
I think this is very important.
Why is it important? Because the AI enabled universe is already here, it's here in the now, but a recent study conducted by the UN showed that more than 57% of all cities in the world, but a large proportion of them in the global South are totally unprepared.
For this.
They have no strategy, they have no policy.
They do not have systems or ideas in place on how to go forward.
So before I enter into the guide per se, let me just mention that this guide focuses on four critical capabilities that we believe are necessary going forward.
The first one is data literacy.
Right? Not every leader needs to be a coder, that's for sure, but every leader needs to know what questions to ask of their data teams.
You have to know what questions to ask.
You may not know what to do with the data or how to manipulate it, but you have to ask the right questions.
You need adaptive governance.
The old business model where we plan, approve, and execute is debt.
That is a linear governance system.
It doesn't work with AI.
The city verse demands continuous iteration.
The field is evolving all the time.
The data you collect today, once you put it into an AI engine and start analyzing it, is going to generate more data that you couldn't even suspect on day one.
So you have to constantly adapt your governance structure.
You need ethical infrastructure.
Without an ethical infrastructure, you will lose trust.
If you lose trust, we saw what happened during the COVID crisis.
Once that trust is lost, it's very hard to win it back again.
Finally, everybody has been saying it.
On this podium, we need to be people centric, we need to be citizen centric.
Technology is not the point.
It's people.
P is at the center at every single step.
Is this mine? Yeah.
Okay.
So we have basically the pulse check.
No, this is not mine.
The pulse check.
What is the first step in this guide? It is a very simple step.
It consists of 12 questions, which shouldn't take a city leader more than half an hour to respond.
What is its purpose? It's not an audit.
It is a health screening.
It's like checking your temperature or checking your blood pressure.
One of several checks that you will need to make along the way, but this is the first one that we are proposing.
So the questions are very practical.
For example, do you have a person in your administration accountable for AI and Metaverse readiness? Is there somebody who's tracking what's happening and looking at the organization as a whole and seeing what is being done and what isn't being done? Second, another typical question, have you published any ethical guidelines for public sector use of digital tools? A very important question.
For example, does your procurement system allow you to buy City as a service as opposed to buying hardware and software? Because with AI and with digital tools, it's not just the hardware and the software.
It's all the services that go with it, the analytical services, et cetera These are not trick questions, but we have used similar questions and similar guides in other contexts, and you'd be surprised how many cities respond no to these 12 questions or are not able to respond yes to all of them.
At the end of this half hour, sitting down with your senior managers, you will be able to determine what tier you are, tier one, two, three, or four.
The most important thing here is to understand that being tier one, there's nothing to be ashamed of.
Every city has to start somewhere.
The shame is staying in tier one and doing nothing about it? And this is the purpose of the guide.
The guide here is to help you step by step.
If you're tier one, how do you get to tier two? If you're tier two, how do you get to tier three, et cetera.
Step two, once you've done this first assessment, step two is deals with the essential 20 questions that we will ask.
Here we think that you need to work as a team.
You cannot do this alone.
You should be doing this with department heads, and it shouldn't take very long either.
You can do this in a senior management meeting that lasts, let's say, half a day.
Because it's a list of 20 questions.
People can take them back, reflect on them, come back to a meeting with their answers.
Each one of these questions has a score that is linked with it.
For example, we have governance indicators, we have infrastructure indicators, we have skills indicators, and we have trust indicators.
Now, if you go through these various questions and you answer them, for example, Is your frontline staff trained in basic data use and basic data collection? Do they know what it takes to collect proper data and clean data? If the answer is no, you have a score.
It's one to four, so you have a scale, and if the answer is absolutely yes, then you go forward.
Governance indicators, do you have a mechanism where you discuss digital tools across all departments? Are you meeting across all departments to see who is doing what with digital tools? If you don't have that or you only do it occasionally, you have a score.
At the end of this step, you have a score, and this score is going to give you a rapid assessment where you stand, right? And that is going to make it's not a question of whether your score is high or low.
The low scores are indicating where you need to take action.
It's just as I mentioned, it's like taking your temperature, taking your blood pressure.
Now we're going a little bit further, maybe blood analysis, and all the results from these various tests are giving you a health check and now you know what you need to do.
You have a fever, you need to treat it.
You have high blood pressure, you need to exercise or change your lifestyle, whatever.
This is the same thing.
It's not more complicated than that.
We provide, therefore, a visual means of interpreting your score.
You have critical gaps of zero to 20, 21 to 40, you have foundation, you have a solid foundation on which you can build on.
41 to 60, you already have a solid platform, and then 61 to 80, you have a very strong level of readiness and cities that are in a very strong state of readiness, one of the most important ways they can move forward is by helping other cities.
Because the more you help if you're at the top in the score, your duty is not only your duty.
If you want to advance, you should be helping other cities because that's how you learn.
So this is, in essence, how the system works.
It's once you have these scores, you're looking at how you can interpret those scores to develop a 90 day action plan, right? You've identified your weaknesses, you've identified your strengths, and now we're going to build on them according to your tier with a 90 day action plan.
The beauty of all this is that is three things.
One, you can use, you're using the knowledge that your staff have of the organization to do this.
You don't need an external consultant, and you don't need to collect new data.
This assessment guide at this stage requires the knowledge of your staff and existing data.
No, you don't need external consultants.
Of course, if you want to have them, you can use them, but at this stage, you don't need them.
So the 90 day action plan is the result of this assessment.
It should be achievable within, I would say a week.
Within a week, week to ten days, you should be able to have the elements of an action plan.
So I want to conclude by saying that the action plan is comprised of steps, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and 12 months, what you need to do during these 30 day intervals in order to make sure that you don't fall behind.
But I would like to conclude by saying that there are some guiding principles behind this guide, and I think the first and most important principle is that you start with the problem.
Not the technology.
Previous speakers talked about smart cities.
If you want to engage in a smart city policy strategy and action plan, the first and most important question you have to ask what made us stupid in the first place? What's not working? That's the most important question you have to ask.
How did we become stupid? By answering that question, then you can start building up a strong and logical and clear strategy going forward to become smarter.
The second one is trust.
Trust today is no longer just a luxury, it is infrastructure.
That's why this guide has built trust every single step of the way.
Every time we have a question that is related to trust.
You have to be we're using other people's data.
We're using data gleaned from mobile telephones, from your records, your medical record, et cetera we're collecting data through the cameras, through the sensors.
It is people's data.
You have a right to use it, manipulate it, exploit it as long as you have the people's trust.
So those are I will finish there and be glad to take any questions.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
I like it very much the points that I was taking notes here, how you highlighted that technology alone does not create better cities, what matters is really what you are saying, knowledge, trust, and that we really connect people real humans need So thank you so much for that.
So I will conclude here and I will hand over to our master of ceremonies because we only have more 10 minutes with our interpreters and I would like that we can all benefit for our concluding remarks because the Director of ITU is going to make the concluding remarks.
But I wanted to thank you all for the great opportunity to be here today, back to you.
Thank you very much, Ali, and now is my pleasure to invite again, Mr.
Cesar Noy, the Director of IT Telecommunications Standardization Bureau to deliver his closing remarks on A.
Thank you.
A I thank you all very much for bringing G to this discussion.
And of course, our co organizer, Ewan Habitat and Region for making this event possible.
For states to take advantage of AI and other frontier technologies, we need common understanding across the public and private sectors and technical tools to innovate with confidence and at scale.
We will need to build on a wide range of expertise to ensure that we create meaningful differences in people's lives.
I thank you for your commitment to this goal.
ITU is here to support you.
I look forward to our continued to work together to equip states worldwide with standards, capacity and skills.
The the need for AI to work for everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr.
Lay, for your closing remarks and thank you many thanks to all the participants for joining us and on behalf of ITU UN Habitat and the government of Azerbijan the coganizer of this event, I would like to thank all the speakers, moderators, partners, and participants for contributing to this important conversation at Wo 13 and we wish you a productive coordination of the World Urban Forum.
Thank you very much.