South Korea to share smart city policy expertise with Saudi Arabia

South Korea's National Human Resources Development Institute announced Monday it will launch a smart city capacity-building training program to share the country's experience in designing and operating intelligent city policies with Saudi Arabia.

The two-week program was organized at the request of the Misk Foundation, a nonprofit established by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to advance his Vision 2030 agenda. It targets nine senior civil servants at the director-general level or above from seven Saudi government agencies, including the Ministry of Transport and Logistics Services.

The curriculum reflects Saudi policy priorities and will cover four core areas of urban innovation: smart city governance and geospatial information, intelligent transportation and autonomous driving, the hydrogen economy and energy transition, and intelligent robot technology.

The program pairs classroom instruction with field visits. Participants will tour Anyang's integrated smart city control center to see smart city policy in action, visit the Korea Transportation Safety Authority's K-City autonomous driving test site, and travel to Ulsan's hydrogen pilot city to observe the hydrogen economy in practice.

Participants will also take part in a policy-planning workshop in which they work together to design a smart city by drawing on the roles and functions of their respective ministries.

The workshop is designed to help participants map out how transportation, logistics, energy and urban administration interact within a city, and to build their capacity for integrated policy design that cuts across ministerial boundaries to encompass technology, budgets and legal frameworks.

The institute said it will also support participants in developing the training outcomes into concrete policy proposals and implementation plans for their own work.

"This training is a platform for genuine partnership in which South Korea and Saudi Arabia learn from each other's experience," National Human Resources Development Institute President Lim Chae-won said. "We hope that Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 and the urban innovation policy experience South Korea has accumulated will come together to build a lasting cooperative relationship between the two countries."