The 7th edition of Smart City Expo Miami opens on October 5 at Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus, bringing together city officials, urban planners, entrepreneurs and investors around AI-driven city management, mobility, climate resilience and the policies that connect them.
On Tuesday October 6, Andrea Macario, Director for Startups on the Board of the Miami Scientific Italian Community and Head of Strategic Partnerships at Enviro City, hosts a fireside chat with Augusto Ferrentino, General Manager of Smart Leaf, on turning municipal fleets into civic intelligence infrastructure.
Smart Leaf is a nine year public private partnership with AMA, Rome’s municipal waste agency, that electrified the city’s street sweeping fleet and equipped it to generate data as it works. Sweeping coverage tripled to more than 55,000 km a year across all fifteen districts. The same passes that mapped fallen leaves also surveyed 24,000 storm drains and geo-tagged some 18,000 potholes, so blocked drains were cleared before the storms rather than after. The programme mobilised 14 million euros of private capital against measurable performance.
The conversation will cover how the partnership was structured, what changed operationally once service became verifiable street by street, and which parts of the model transfer to American cities. Macario, who leads the group’s United States development from Miami, will focus the discussion on that last question.
The Miami Scientific Italian Community exists to advance development and growth through research, and works to that end across academic and industrial research, technology transfer, support for ventures in advanced technology sectors, and collaboration between universities, companies and public institutions in Italy and the United States. Its priority areas for that cooperation include information and communications technology and disaster resilience, both of which meet in this case: a fleet that documents a city’s drainage network while it sweeps is, in the end, resilience infrastructure. Bringing an operator with a working European model in front of the people who run American cities is what technology transfer looks like when it leaves the page.
Fireside chat: Tuesday, October 6, Wolfson Campus, Miami Dade College.
