The congress is held alongside Tomorrow.Mobility and HOWS Barcelona
Mayors from Paris to Freetown turn Smart City Expo into the key global urban summit of 2026
Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC), the leading international event on cities and urban innovation organized by Fira de Barcelona, will bring together more than 600 speakers from 3 to 5 November at the Gran Via venue under the theme “Urban Solutions, Real Impact”. Held jointly with Tomorrow.Mobility World Congress, the newly launched HOWS Barcelona – Housing World Summit, and Tomorrow.Blue Economy, this year’s edition welcomes mayors and regional leaders from four continents, raising the gathering to the level of a true international summit of cities.
The political dimension of the 2026 edition is embodied by Anne Hidalgo, former Mayor of Paris and Global Ambassador of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, who governed the French capital for more than a decade and became one of the leading municipal voices in the global climate debate. She will be joined by mayors and regional leaders from all over the world, among them Andre Dickens, Mayor of Atlanta; Haris Doukas, Mayor of Athens; Giuseppe Sala, Mayor of Milan; Gergely Karácsony, Mayor of Budapest; Daryl Barron, Lord Mayor of Dublin; Yvonne Aki-Sawyer, Mayor of Freetown.
Together with other local government representatives including Claudio Orrego, Governor of the Metropolitan Regional Government of Santiago de Chile; and Jaakko Mustakallio, Deputy Mayor of Tampere, Finland, they will tackle the most pressing challenges cities face and outline a common agenda around climate, housing and quality of life.
Housing, one of the central concerns of this year’s edition, gains further institutional weight through HOWS Barcelona, hosted by Barcelona City Council, which will host the Housing Mayors Meeting and Roundtable as a space for political dialogue and cooperation between cities on affordability, one of the defining urban questions of the decade.
The congress keynote will be delivered by Nikolas Badminton, Chief Futurist and Think Tank leader at Futurist.com. Badminton is an artificial intelligence expert who helps companies and institutions build strategic foresight capabilities, identify the trends shaping our world and prepare for complex environments through long-term thinking and scenario planning. Additionally, Ayumi Moore Aoki, founder of Women in Tech Global, will also take part in the congress to address diversity and inclusion as drivers of urban innovation. Her work focuses on bridging the gender gap in technology and empowering talent worldwide, showing how inclusive leadership and digital transformation can support urban development.
Industry and international leadership
The corporate and institutional presence rounds off the lineup of speakers with Kees Hertogh, Vice President of Global Industry Marketing at Microsoft, and Rochelle Haynes, Managing Director of What Works Cities at Bloomberg Philanthropies, the initiative that helps local governments use data and evidence to improve public services. They will be joined by Nam Guan Ng, General Manager and Head of Global Smart Cities at Dell; Bilel Jamoussi, Deputy Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau; and John Li, General Manager of the Global Government Business Department at Dahua Technology.
SCEWC 2026 expects more than 27,000 attendees and over 1,100 exhibitors, including Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Dell Technologies and Veolia, while the new Terra50 showcase will present fifty leading solutions in urban sustainability. Alongside Tomorrow.Mobility World Congress, co-organized with EIT Urban Mobility, and HOWS Barcelona, the event will also host Tomorrow.Blue Economy, the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit and the Barcelona Cybersecurity Congress.