Demonstrating Your Community is Smart City Ready – Three Recommendations
Last week, there were two notable announcements by organizations administering Smart City Challenges.
The announcements got me to thinking: what does it mean for a community to be smart city ready?
The AdvancingCities Challenge and Smart City Readiness Challenge
· JPMorgan Chase announced five winning cities for the first year of its AdvancingCities Challenge. Chicago, Louisville, Miami, San Diego and Syracuse were selected from more than 250 applications submitted by 143 communities in 43 U.S. states. Each selected city will be awarded $3 million over a period of three years. The application for second group of winning cities will open in Fall of 2019.
· Smart Cities Council announced five winning cities that will participate in Council’s Smart City Readiness initiative. Baltimore, Edmonton, Montgomery, Racine and San Diego were selected from more than 100 applications from communities across North America. The selected cities will join the 2017 and 2018 winners as the third cohort of communities to access Smart Cities Council resources designed to help their communities plan, manage and actualize their smart and connected community objectives. Presuming the Smart City Council continues the initiative and follows last year’s schedule, interested communities will be able to apply for the 2020 Readiness Challenge in a few months.
Smart City Curiosity is Not Sufficient — Winning Applications Must Demonstrate a Community’s Smart City Readiness
In response to 1,800 inquiries that JPMorgan Chase received regarding its September 12 announcement of the AdvancingCities Challenge, the company released a “Five things to know about AdvancingCities” memo to potential applicants. The JPMorgan memo makes clear that winning applications will reflect a community’s efforts to secure necessary capacity and partnerships required to execute an impactful program. Applicants should, according to the memo, “apply when ready” and not before they are ready.
Ironically, applications to the Smart Cities Readiness Challenge also need to demonstrate that the applicant’s community is smart city ready. In an interview with the Racine Journal Times, Racine Mayor Cory Mason emphasizes the extensive preparation that was a part of Racine’s winning application.
“Winning the Smart Cities Readiness Challenge is the culmination of more than a year’s worth of work in which the City has brought together amazing community partners around the idea the we can use technology to deliver better services to our residents while at the same time creating a more inclusive and equitable City.”
Given the number of municipalities responding to Smart City Challenges, it shouldn’t be surprising that an interest in Smart City alone is not sufficient; winning applications need to demonstrate a certain level of readiness for Smart and Connected Community projects.
Three Key Elements of Smart City Readiness
Drawing on my experience working with local governments on smart and connected community projects and conversations I have had with participants during Smart City 101 workshops, I propose that communities applying to Smart City Challenge and seeking to demonstrate smart city readiness should highlight the following:
· Access to advanced communications network with the capacity to connect residents, homes, schools, businesses and devices across the community. The most transformative smart and connected community projects collect and analyze vast quantities of data, automate processes and optimize resource allocation to improve municipal services, enhance opportunity and inclusion and improve the standard of living in the community. An advanced communications network, including wired and wireless technologies, makes transformative projects possible. Without access to an advanced communications network, questions about project feasibility and/or project scale become paramount.
· Collaborative efforts organized around a shared mission and clear objectives. Partnership is a critical input into successful smart and connected community projects. Ideally, a municipality’s application to a Smart City Challenge will include both a common vision for smart and connected community shared by a broad and diverse set of key project stakeholders and a compelling list of collaborative activities related to the development and execution of well-defined objectives.
· Presence of empowered smart city champions. JPMorgan’s “Five things” memo makes clear that applications demonstrating engagement by the highest levels of local government are stronger than those without such engagement. In addition to letters of support, applications should aim to include evidence that it has empowered Smart City champions. For example, if there are people leading policy changes in permitting or procurement procedures and/or actively developing partnerships on behalf of their municipality, their work should be featured in a community’s application.
About this Medium Site
On this Medium site, I intend to explore an array of topics related to the transformative power of smart and connected communities. A central question for this observer of the smart city movement: how will municipalities develop, deploy and support smart and connected community projects at scale?
I welcome feedback and comments from readers.
