In Romania, we have over 1,300 smart city and smart village projects and initiatives, and 60 projects were entered at the Smart City Industry Awards Gala, with a value of over two billion euros, said on Thursday the president of the Romanian Smart City Association, Eduard Dumitraşcu.

“We continue the tradition and collaboration because we need smart projects. Today we come before you, the communities of Romania come before you, with over 60 projects registered in the gala, totaling a value of more than 2 billion euros. That’s all I want let me remind you: that in Romania we have over 1,300 smart city and smart village projects and initiatives. We have an extraordinarily positive civic pressure and we have two more things that I think will make the difference: the local elections in less than two months and very a lot of money on European funds, which will create civic pressure towards the authorities, both local and central authorities. And because we are talking about central authorities, for two years they have started to take concrete, significant steps in the area of administration local when we talk about smart city. Until now, things were somehow divided, the ministries did the big infrastructure works and the town halls did small projects. We already see that we have local authorities that have taken up big infrastructure, I mean in Braşov, in Sector 4 and we see extremely dynamic ministries that understood what they have to do, understood the funding sources and are going directly to the community with projects,” said Dumitraşcu, according to Agerpres.

He emphasized that the smart city has moved “from the utopian zone” to concrete and there are many positive projects.

“We managed to bring a lot of projects, a lot of experts, a lot of decision-makers, a lot of money. Eight years later Smart City has gone from something utopian to concrete. Tonight you will see projects. Tonight you will see things beautiful, concrete things from Romania that we have tried to promote in these eight years.(…) We have always tried to show that Romania has many problems, but it also has many solutions and many positive projects. And more we also have financing. (…) We are also talking about a lot of financing that Romania has and this creates pressure on you, those in the public administration, in the central administration. But we are also talking about civic pressure. We have civic pressure that I personally love it. I know we want more, I know we can, we all know we have an election in two months. What I should and would be very happy to see in the next eight weeks is talk about sustainability, about solutions , about intelligent Romania, about what green public transport means,” the ARSC president also stated.