Three Australian cities and two in New Zealand have made the short list produced by the New York based Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) for recognition as being the world’s smartest community.
The think tank has named Adelaide, Prospect (SA), the Sunshine Coast, Wellington and Whanganui in a list of 21 cities to begin its annual eight-month process that will conclude with it naming the 2020 Intelligent Community of the Year in June 2020 at the ICF Summit.
The ICF says its semi-finalists are those communities deemed most ready for the 21st century.
“Each has applied the six principles of ICF’s Method to begin to build local economic expansion and prosperity, social health and cultural richness. The ICF believes that these factors together make a community strong and resilient,” it says.
“Each community chose to make the journey from smart city to intelligent community and many have been working on their programs for several years.”
The ICF Method is claimed to “provide the first conceptual framework for understanding all of the factors that determine a community’s competitiveness in the digital economy.”
Each community will now be required to complete a detailed questionnaires to provide more information. Seven will be named as the Top 7 Intelligent Communities of 2020 on February 10 in Taoyuan, Taiwan.
The full list of semi-finalists for the Smart21 Communities of 2020 is:
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Binh Duong Smart City, Vietnam
- Chiayi City, Taiwan
- Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil
- Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
- Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
- Hudson, Ohio, USA
- Issy-les-Moulineaux, France
- Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
- Markham, Ontario, Canada
- Matsu, Taiwan
- Newmarket, Ontario, Canada
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
- Prospect, South Australia, Australia
- Rochester, New York, USA
- Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia
- Tallinn, Estonia
- Wellington, New Zealand
- Westerville, Ohio, USA
- Whanganui, New Zealand
- Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Intelligent community of smart city?
The ICF claims to be the original smart cities organisation. It started life in the 1980s as the Canadian Smart Cities Institute (CSCI) and morphed into the ICF in the 1990s.
However the criteria by which it assesses a community’s intelligence — broadband; knowledge workforce; innovation; digital equality; sustainability; advocacy — are somewhat at odds with those that might generally be seen as defining a smart city, for example the wide reaching definition given in Wikipedia.
“An urban area that uses different types of electronic data collection sensors to supply information which is used to manage assets and resources efficiently [including] data collected from citizens, devices, and assets that is processed and analysed to monitor and manage traffic and transportation systems, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement, information systems, schools, libraries, hospitals, and other community services.”
