 Smart cities. A vision for a sustainable urban environment, where innovative information and communication technologies provide a seamless and positive experience for modern inhabitants. At the WSIS Forum, key players from the technology community, civil society, government and agencies, meet to discuss the future of our cities, and through the hundreds of workshops taking place during the event, discover and develop practical solutions to accelerate the creation of a truly smart digital society. We have hundreds of cities which will use digital technologies for better environment management, for providing quality transport, quality healthcare, a variety of services. And we expect that these projects will actually be the lighthouse projects for ensuring that urban governance and urban management becomes much better in the future. City residents account for half the world's population, and their figure is likely to increase to 75% by 2050. The fast growth of our cities is creating challenges around sustainability. Pollution, traffic, lack of energy supply are issues that residents have to tackle on a daily basis. Grandbreaking technologies such as big data and the Internet of Things are key to create an urban environment where connected people and urban infrastructure like street lights, buildings and roads take on the life of their own and communicate with each other. We design smart buildings that give back to their environment. You can have the numbers that come up if you do the building a little bit smaller or the greenhouse smaller or you put less trees, suddenly you're going to see that your input of CO2 is going to be smaller. And infrastructure, energy efficient buildings and sustainable cities and communities, the smart city's vision addresses most SDGs. However, connectivity is essential for this vision to become a reality. This was strongly in focus at WSIS Forum 2017. And throughout the event, participants were able to discuss and share the innovative and concrete actions on the ground that ensure every human being is connected. Three billion people on the planet are connected, but over four billion people are not. As people get connected, it improves their lives both in terms of social benefit as well as economic benefit. Oftentimes we just talk about the economic benefits, which are extremely important. But we also know that there's enormous social benefit from being connected. It saves times, provides education, health care, brings families together, allows family and friends to communicate with each other over long distances. By bringing together government and civil society, people and objects, ICTs show yet again their essential contribution to our information society and their power to advance SDGs. However, this isn't the end of the story. The key to all this is collaboration. Whatever you take, whether you're talking about education or agriculture or environment or peacekeeping, ICT will be there to be used just as a tool, but as an enabler. These are two different things. It is the environment in which everything happens and without which nothing happens.