The city of Edmonton became the capital of Alberta Province in 1905. Then, in 1947, the discovery of oil in the nearby town of Leduc began transforming the city into a different kind of metropolis: the Oil Capital of Canada. For decades, government and petroleum were the principal drivers of an economy and population that surged upward – until the boom-and-bust cycle of the oil and gas industry proved to the city it needed to diversify into such industries as manufacturing, education, finance and technology.

By 2024, 13% of employees still worked in public administration and only 1% in oil and gas, while 86% were employed across nearly 20 other sectors. In the 21st Century, that taste for innovation and diversification has helped the community adapt to the continuing waves of change that keep sweeping across Canada and the world.

New Drivers

Being a provincial capital brings its privileges, and access to good infrastructure is usually one. The regional incumbent wired the most attractive markets on its own, and Edmonton’s government complemented it with an Open Access Initiative: a partnership with multiple providers to expand access to underserved areas. As a result, by 2022, 92% of the population had access to broadband at a minimum of 50/10 Mpbs (upload/download). The city’s free Wi-Fi network meanwhile logs 14,000 device connections per week.

Equipped to compete in a digital economy, the city focuses on accelerating growth through its innovation agency, Edmonton Unlimited. Founded in 2020 with a mission to create a vibrant innovation ecosystem, EU is a partnership with MacEwan University’s School of Business that supports students, graduates, post-doc researchers and faculty in turning ideas into enterprises. It offers workshops, co-working space and partnerships with three accelerators that can guide startups in scaling up their customer base, products and services. Its annual Startup Week is a highlight of the business calendar that focuses attention on the newest crop of innovative new businesses – which total more than 240 alumni company in the first three years of the agency’s existence.

For existing companies, the Business-Friendly Edmonton team guides owners through permitting, licensing and grant programs. To reduce the bureaucratic workload, the city has introduced AI-enabled permit approvals for property development, virtual permit inspections and online business license applications, which has reduced the time it takes to issue a business licenses by 30 percent.

Edmonton also invites companies to use city infrastructure as a testbed for innovative technology. Successful testing opportunities become case studies that help companies market their products, while city departments gain access to innovations that can benefit their work. One example of this “City as a Lab” service is a pilot project enabling a company to test, on city-owned land, its advanced tree seedling production for reforestation. The project provided a proving ground for the company’s business model while improving carbon storage on city property.

Partners in Positive Change

As Edmonton grows, the city is careful to listen to what its residents care about and to keep them informed about the actions it plans. The Edmonton Insight Community is a platform where more than 15,000 subscribers – residents and property owners age 15 and up – provide feedback on city issues.

Engaged Edmonton is a hub for city-led engagement. It offers residents information on proposed projects, ranging from planning to safety, transportation and arts and culture. The platform invites their feedback and makes it easy to connect directly with city staff leading the projects and to receive notifications as the project develops.

Lifting Up its Citizens

Change brings both gains and losses. According to the Edmonton Social Policy Council, from 2006 to 2019, Edmonton had a poverty rate of 12-13% due to a continuing preponderance of low-wage jobs in agriculture, education, health care and tourism. The pandemic made things worse.

The EndPovertyEdmonton Strategy began in September 2014 with 200 Edmonton residents from diverse backgrounds and sectors divided into working groups to analyze poverty issues and develop recommendations for action. With approval by the City Council in 2015, the organization developed an Implementation Road Map to provide specific direction for combating poverty, including making all Edmontonians aware of its realities in the city and the steps they can take to help. This program wound down its operations in 2024, and the city replaced it with a Community Mobilization Task Force on Housing and Homelessness.  In 2025, the City Council budgeted more than C$3 million for its programs, including housing retrofits, aid in moving from homelessness into housing, and support for vulnerable tenants. 

Another Edmonton institution, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), focuses on qualifying people for better employment. NAIT has created numerous programs designed to give students the skills most needed by regional employers, including classes to address climate change and to help the region make its cities smarter and its industry more efficient. NAIT operates a fleet of mobile semi-tractor-trailer education units known as NIMs (NAIT in Motion) that bring state-of-the-art equipment directly to communities most in need. It is one of seven post-secondaries in Edmonton, with the University of Alberta ranking 8th in the 2025 Times Higher Education Impact Ranking. 

The Edmonton Public Library (EPL) loans portable Wi-Fi hotspots with unlimited data to adult library cardholders. These hotspots enable cardholders to access the Internet anywhere they take the device. “We know many Edmontonians don’t have home Internet access, and EPL is committed to providing people the skills and support they need to participate in the digital world,” said Pilar Martinez, EPL’s Chief Executive Officer.

From Petroleum to Sunlight

Turning from its petroleum legacy, Edmonton is encouraging an energy transition among its residents and businesses with a Community Energy Transition Strategy and Action Plan. By 2030, the plan targets a 50% reduction in community-based net GHG emissions and a 35% reduction in per-capita energy use, compared to 2005 levels, with continuing progress through 2050. The keys to the plan are investment and economic development of renewable energy, the energy-efficient retrofit of buildings and more stringent building codes, and the development of low-emission transportation. Edmonton now has a Green Economy Coordinator on staff and programs helping to finance energy retrofits and solar panel installation. While adding to government expenditures and regulation, these moves are also enhancing quality of life and generating investment, business starts and new employment.

To help with this transition, NAIT has invested heavily in its Alternative Energy Technology program, which provides training and research in alternative energy technology. The program has achieved a 92% employment rate for full-time student within nine months of graduation. NAIT also offers 13,800 apprenticeship seats and is one of the largest apprenticeship trainers in Canada with 33 distinct registered trades programs.

Edmonton has made an impressive pivot from its economic past to a future that holds greater opportunity as well as major uncertainties. Of all the skills the city and its people have learned, the ability to experiment, learn and adapt may be their greatest asset.

Population: 1,190,000

Website: www.edmonton.ca

Smart21 2008 | 2009 | 2015 | 2017

Top7 2017

Calgary is a western city of 900,000 people that is one of the fastest-growing communities in Canada. Best known as a center of the Canadian oil industry and for its annual “Stampede” celebration of its cowboy heritage, Calgary also has a significant telecommunications and wireless manufacturing base, and over 1,300 software companies with expertise in geomatics and image processing. It has more miles of optical fiber than any city in Canada, according to the Yankee Group, and broadband Internet is accessible to 99% of residences. In the ten years between 1988 to 1998, technology employment tripled to over 9% of the labor force, and technology employers include IBM, EDS, AT&T, Vertitas, Shaw Communications, Nortel Networks and TELUS.

Calgary Technologies

Leading the charge to build a Digital Age economy for the community is the public-private corporation, Calgary Technologies. Its projects include Calgary INFOPORT, which has succeeded in building a local information and communications technology industry; the Calgary Innovation Center, which acts as a catalyst between life sciences innovators and the venture capital community; and the Alastair Ross Technology Center incubator. In 2001, Calgary Technologies launched the ConnectCalgary project, using matching funds from the Canadian Government’s Smart Community award program. ConnectCalgary is creating online services and Web portals, public access computer terminals, and a team of trained facilitators to work with government agencies and individuals at risk. ConnectCalgary aims to provide the at-risk population of Calgary with access to the social, health and educational services they need to become more independent and productive members of the community. With this latest program, Calgary has demonstrated leadership in closing the Digital Divide in western Canada.

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Population: 900,000

Website: www.calgary.ca

Intelligent Community of the Year 2002 (co-honoree)

Top7 2002

A successful technology cluster with ample broadband assets, Burlington seeks to remain a competitive place for businesses to grow. In consultation with citizens and businesses, local government is developing new clusters, creating education and training projects, e-government platforms, and subsidized broadband access programs.

Population: 173,811

Website: www.burlington.ca

Smart21 2006 | 2007

Free trade zone and regional business hub for information technology companies.

Population: 5,500

Website: www.dic.ae

Smart21 2006

Despite an increase in output since 1999, oil reserves will be depleted by 2020. In anticipation of this, Doha, the national capitol, has committed nearly 3% of GDP to science and technology initiatives, including Education City, which are beginning to build a society driven by knowledge work.

Population: 400,051

Website: www.gov.qa

Smart21 2008

The second largest city in Israel, Tel Aviv is also its richest, home to the nation’s stock exchange. Newsweek magazine called it one of the ten most technologically influential cities in the world, because of its concentration of venture capital, research institutes and technology firms. Other industries include chemical processing, textiles and food. By the end of 2000, the city contained 86% of Israel’s high-tech companies but is also a center for the creative industries and home to Tel Aviv University, the country’s largest academic institution. Fixed broadband passes 99% of homes and penetration is well above 60%. The Great Recession has hit Tel Aviv’s tech sector hard, particularly venture capitalists used to a 25% annual return, but pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and solar technologies continue to grow.

Population: 384,400

Website: www.tel-aviv.gov.il/english

Smart21 2010

Using funds from development agencies and the US government, this war-torn capital of Afghanistan has built a telecom-based foundation for government by linking ministries with district offices and military bases throughout the country while expanding mobile service nationwide from 0.01% to 6% in three years.

Population: 2,500,000

Website: km.gov.af/en

Smart21 2007

ICF selected the city of Sunderland as a Top Seven Intelligent Community for four years in a row. The largest city in the Northeast of England, Sunderland quite literally rose from the ashes of the Industrial Age to create a globally competitive city prospering in the Broadband Economy. This transformation was due to neither luck nor location, but to visionary leadership, good planning and unrelenting commitment.

In the 1980s, this former shipbuilding and mining center on the North Sea, which at one time launched more ships than any other port in Europe, had a peak unemployment rate of 22%. As the last shipyard closed in 1988 and the last coal mine followed in 1994, Sunderland fell into the bottom 10% of Britain's "depressed districts." The legacy of heavy industry was a large unemployed group of low-skilled workers, many with chronic health problems. With so little local opportunity, young people fled the city, leaving behind a shrinking and aging population.

Partnership Strategy

Sunderland's government responded in a way that would become a much-copied strategy for success. In 1991, it organized a volunteer group called the Sunderland Partnership, comprised of members from government, local universities, the chamber of commerce and citizen leaders representing important constituencies. The Partnership developed a vision for a new economy based on what Europeans called "telematics" - the union of telecommunications and computers. While City Council staff labored to translate this vision into measurable goals and meaningful programs, the Partnership focused on politics. Members educated their organizations and constituents about the crisis into which Sunderland had fallen, the challenges to recovery, and their vision for the future. This was to prove essential to Sunderland's success, because it created the political will and integration needed to embrace change.

The Telematics Strategy was published in 1996 to cover a 5-year period through 2001. It included training programs in call center and other Digital Age skills for the unemployed, public-access Internet kiosks and "electronic village halls" with Internet access, business incubation programs and an initial, government-funded high-speed network for a metropolitan area possessing no more than basic telephone infrastructure.

Doxford International

Meanwhile, the economic development staff succeeded in persuading a real estate developer to build the first speculative building of what is now Doxford International, an award-winning office park. During the 1990s, it filled and expanded, filled again and expanded again as the European headquarters of Nike and Verisign, and home to such companies as Barclays, CitiFinancial, EDF Energy and T-Mobile. These companies were attracted by the high-quality facilities in a city with attractive wage costs, a strong incentive program, and the availability of freshly-trained labor. The same team won public-sector funding from the national government and European Commission and invested it in rebuilding the derelict waterfront into a new home for the University of Sunderland, a former technical institute that had gained university status in 1992.

By 2000, Sunderland had created 9,000 new jobs. A second Telematics strategy, covering the 1999-2003 period, focused on using ICT to promote social inclusion and ensure that everyone benefited from the city's transformation into an Intelligent Community. It set new goals, including development of a publicly-owned ISP and e-government hub called the Sunderland Host, expansion of the high-speed network to businesses and community centers, and creation of a one-stop Sunderland Portal for citizens, business and government users. There was no let-up, however, in economic development efforts. In 2002, EDS opened its first data center in the North of England in Sunderland. During the three years from 2002 to 2004, Sunderland secured 72% of the new jobs entering the region, despite having just 11% of the North's population.

The latest plan, called The Sunderland Strategy (2004-07) has focused on exploiting the city's global connectivity and growing knowledge workforce to attract even more inward investment and encourage the formation and growth of small and midsize companies. For the past five years, the number of net new jobs has increased 4.87% compared with the UK average of 3.17%. Sunderland has also seen a measurable improvement in the quality of those jobs, with growth primarily in financial and customer services that offer good pay and prospects for advancement. From 2004 to 2005, gross weekly pay in Sunderland rose at three times the national average, and the average salary for full-time employees is almost double the national minimum wage.

Working Together

Sunderland's transformation from industrial has-been to Intelligent Community illustrates the power of making many separate elements work in concert. For example, the city's activism about deploying broadband, and willingness to create joint ventures where necessary to reduce risks to the private sector, convinced carriers including NTL-Telewest, BT and Tiscali to provide broadband at competitive costs for speeds up to 10 Mbps. Broadband penetration has leaped from 25% two years ago to 75% today. The City Council has taken advantage of this connectivity to create an e-government portal that delivers a wide range of services to about 30,000 visitors per month. Broadband is also the medium for a Virtual Learning Environment created by the City of Sunderland College that is used by more than 20,000 students for training in information technology.

The "electronic village halls" created by the first Telematics Strategy are being expanded into multi-agency centers, which provide healthcare, housing, welfare rights, police, job-finder and other services as well youth and sports facilities. Video-conferencing links people using the centers to support staff. These are supplemented by kiosks distributed throughout the city. Sunderland has also identified and trained Community e-Champions to broaden digital inclusion at the neighborhood level, as part of a "peoplefirst" strategy that also equips social service workers with wireless PDAs from which they can instantly check databases and record service requests.

Following on the success of Doxford International, Sunderland has attracted major investment in technology office parks and incubators. The Business & Innovation Center at the Sunderland Science Park offers 200,00 sq. ft. (18,580 m2)of high-tech workspace housing 165 companies employing 1,100 people. The Rainton Bridge Business Park currently houses 150,000 sq. ft. (13,935 m2) of incubators and technology facilities and will become the site of a 400,000 sq. ft. development by Northern Rock that will put the site on course to exceed the original target of 4,000 new jobs.

The University of Sunderland, with 250 full time R&D staff, has become an innovation hub that makes business formation a priority. A Digital Media Center created with support from Sony is the most advanced facility of its kind in the UK, with 50,000 sq. ft. (4,645 m2) of film, TV and radio studios, and includes an incubation space for students setting up their own businesses. A New Ventures project facilitates the spin-out of new businesses from University research, while the University continues to expand incubator facilities and develop venture financing in collaboration with government and the private sector. A recent survey revealed that 10% of Sunderland's labor force is now self-employed - inspired perhaps by the success of local entrepreneurs like Paul Callaghan, who founded Leighton Group at the Business & Innovation Center in 1997. It is now a global business serving customers including British Airways, Lloyds TSB and Microsoft.

So successful have been its efforts to develop a knowledge-based economy that Sunderland has begun branding itself as the "Software City." It is remarkable to think that, in a single generation, the people of Sunderland have moved from slag heaps, slums and stagnation into a future built on turning knowledge into prosperity.

Population: 283,700

Labor Force: 126,100

Website: www.sunderland.gov.uk

Smart21 2007

Top7 2002 | 2004 | 2005 | 2007

Manchester is the hub of a Greater Manchester urban area of some 2.6 million people. It has a vibrant economy where, according to The Times of London, 60 international banks and 80 of the UK's top 100 companies have offices. In 2002, it hosted the 2002 Commonwealth Games, the world's second largest sporting event, and the Sportscity development created for the Games has become a valued asset.

But it is also a city of sharp contrasts. The district of East Manchester – once the hub of Britain's world-leading cotton industry – was decimated by the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s. It suffered a 60% employment loss between 1975 and 1985, when 52% of households were receiving state benefits. In 1998, two of East Manchester's electoral districts were among the top twenty on the UK government's National Index of Deprivation. As the rest of the metropolitan area has risen to the challenges of the Broadband Economy, the failure of East Manchester has become more glaring. But it has also planted the seeds of hope for regeneration.

The Eastserve Project

New East Manchester Limited is a partnership between Manchester City Council, national government agencies and the local community. It is responsible for developing and implementing a strategy to revitalize East Manchester's economy, increase employment, improve education and create more and higher-quality housing. One of its projects, Eastserve, is recognized by ICF for deploying an IT-based solution that addresses these goals while strengthening the social bonds of the community.

At first glance, Eastserve is a Web portal (www.eastserve.com), little different from government or neighborhood sites in thousands of communities. What sets it apart is the way in which it was implemented and the skills of the developers in meeting so many different goals.

Begun in 2000, the Eastserve project began by surveying residents on their needs for information and their ability to access it. Residents identified four priorities: employment and training, housing, policing and street-based services. As a result, the portal design included a virtual police station with anonymous crime reporting, a home-finder system for public housing, and online job searches and resume preparation system, among many other features.

The surveys also revealed that only 19% of residents had access to a computer. In response, Eastserve tapped a UK Government program that distributed recycled computers in deprived areas in order to launch a 2001 pilot project involving 450 households. Each household received a recycled PC or set-top box at a subsidized price, plus free dial-up Internet access for the first three months. The project also placed PCs at public access locations including police stations, housing offices and youth clubs. The pilot was successful enough to lead to a second phase that targeted 4,500 households to receive new or recycled computers, added new content to the Web portal, tied the project into IT training programs for schools funded by the e-Learning Foundation, and tackled the problems of financial exclusion.

Firing On All Cylinders

In Phase Two, Eastserve began firing on all cylinders, thanks to the down-to-earth advice offered by a Residents Panel of volunteers and volunteer Project Board. With 25% of East Manchester residents lacking any access to broadband, the project created a wireless Eastserve Broadband network that now links 1,700 households, six community centers and 14 schools and is being extended to adjoining neighborhoods. Its work with residents convinced Eastserve that they rapidly outgrew the capabilities of recycled PCs and set-top TV systems. In response, it began offering new fully-configured PCs at a higher price (£200) compared with £50 for a recycled system. Uptake was so strong that the cost of the subsidies made it necessary to scale the pilot back to 3,500 households. All residents who purchased the subsidized systems were required to attend a three-hour training course at local community centers, online centers or the local college. Eastserve also took the opportunity created by the sale of systems to involve the East Manchester Credit Union in handling all cash for the program and offering low-interest loans to residents. The loans made it possible for many more people to participate and also connected many of them for the first time to a financial institution other than loan sharks or check-cashing services.

This small-scale success is likely to set a pattern for greater progress in the future. According to Eastserve's leadership, the project has helped Manchester's City Council to understand both the potential of technology-based economic development and the need to invest in creating demand for e-government programs. With strong support from governmental leaders, the future of East Manchester looks brighter than it has in years.

Population: 430,000

Website: www.manchester.gov.uk

Smart21 2006 | 2009

Top7 2006

Capital of Great Britain and of the UK government's digital growth strategy.

Population: 7,500,000

Website: www.london.gov.uk

Smart21 2006