For the second consecutive year, ICF partnered with the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, the largest annual Smart City conference in the world.

This year, ICF coordinated a VIP Delegation with a curated agenda for the week, bringing together participants from around the world to explore, learn, and contribute to the conversations defining how cities adapt, innovate, and thrive.

Also available on Apple Podcasts

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla has a conversation with Michel Ângelo Bomtempo, mayor of Assaí, Paraná, Brazil. Mayor Bomtempo and a team of young people engage ICF to promote their city. It's fresh and shows why the ICF Awards are so important.

Humans are the masters of Earth when it comes to energy. We reap it from fossil fuels, the sun, wind and waters, even from the atom. You are using it now to read these words. Yet we waste most of it in the form of heat, whether it’s the blazing temperatures inside the engine of your car or the heat pouring out of the smokestack of a factory. By most, I mean up to 70 percent. That’s ridiculously bad for both our wallets and our environment.

What if there was a technology that could harvest the waste heat from factories, power plants and data centers and turn it into electricity? Well, there is – and it is being born at a startup housed at a university in an underappreciated corner of Ontario Province called Durham.

Bursa Metropolitan Municipality is the first TOP7 Intelligent Community in Türkiye. Izmir and Konya Metropolitan Municipalities have met ICF’s Smart21 level, but Bursa has successfully leapt forward, and in its first year of applying, has impressed the adjudicators to make it to the 2025 TOP7. I was interested in finding out how this happened and undertook the site visit as this year’s TOP7 auditor to Bursa. I am glad I did. I was thoroughly impressed. Bursa’s leaders are proud that their community was the first capital of the Ottoman Empire and the terminus of the Silk Road. It is a double UNESCO World Heritage community, has had an amazing growth trajectory as an industrial leader, and is seeking to become a world leader in innovation and sustainability through its transition into a digital ecosystem. But they do not dwell on the past nor ignore it. 

What if there was an intelligence test for your community? How would it score? 

An intelligence test is a set of carefully designed questions that measure how well we reason, remember, understand visual information and solve problems. They are used to predict how we will do in school, work and military service and – believe it or not – our odds of living a long and healthy life. But IQ scores offer probabilities, not facts. Of equal or greater importance are all
the beautiful, complex and messy human factors, from personality and creativity to social skills, social class and family history.

The same is true of a community. Smarts matter – but so do the community’s stories about itself. So do its geography, the skills and creativity of its people and conditions far beyond its control. A community IQ test would have to measure all that. But how?

In part 2 of this conversation with the City of Bursa on The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla has a conversation with Demet Sinmez, Smart Urbanization Branch Manager, Bursa Metropolitan Municipality.

(New York City – October 9, 2025) The Intelligent Community Forum today announced the renewal of New Taipei City’s Full Certification as an Intelligent Community, based on an audit of the programs, policies and achievements that make New Taipei City a highly desirable place to live, work and innovate in Taiwan. 

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla has a conversation with Demet Sinmez, Smart Urbanisation Branch Manager, Bursa Metropolitan Municipality.

In part 2 of this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla has a conversation with Bob Ferguson, Senior Master Coordinator, Fairfield/Jefferson County, Iowa.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla has a conversation with Bob Ferguson, Senior Master Coordinator, Fairfield/Jefferson County, Iowa.