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"We need to talk about smart communities, not just smart cities, and smart communities mean that we've already built a common set of aspirations, desires, as soon as we see what happens after these two disasters that hit us in the recent years, the pandemic and the war nearby. We are going to have to talk and have a national debate on collective responsibility and collective security, and ultimately on national security, because very often when we establish some big aspirations for our country at the centre we might collide with the interests of the various communities, which could be different, or with the interests of individuals," said Dincu, at the Parliament Palace, at the Smart City Industry Awards Gala.
He added that talking about a smart city today "is no longer a kind of award," but it is becoming a project of great responsibility.
"In the future, beyond our individual projects, whether it's the smart city industry or the local communities, we need to think of the smart city as a form of shared responsibility. (...) We need to think holistically from now on, because it is not enough to make your own smart city toy, we will have to think how we integrate everything together. We didn't realize three years ago, before the pandemic, that smart city will be a phrase that will be related to a major crisis, to the destruction, as it happens now, of an entire urban infrastructure system, like we see happening in Ukraine. We also didn't think we'd see major crisis, the destruction, as is now the case, of an entire urban infrastructure system, as is unfortunately happening now in Ukraine. We also didn't think that we were going to see empty cities, like it happened during the pandemic, cities without people, which seemed dead and in which we were afraid to get in contact and we were afraid to socialize with the other people, even if we needed to socialize so much. These are the new challenges," said the Minister.
