Its name means “many waters” in the language of the Native Americans who first settled in this meeting place of rivers. Natural abundance created agricultural prosperity and a strategic location made Walla Walla a 19th Century shipping hub – until it was bypassed by the trans-continental railroad and its prominence was gradually eclipsed by the coastal city of Seattle. Today, Walla Walla grows wheat that is sought-after in Asian markets, produces fruit sold across the US, and has seen explosive growth of wine-making, with 160 registered vineyards. Tourists seeking fine wines and natural beauty have given birth to a thriving culinary and arts scene, providing residents and businesses with an outstanding quality of life.

Ringed by mountain ranges, however, Walla Walla is geographically isolated. It is not located on a major transport route, and has limited air service. The city is reasonably well served by incumbent broadband providers, but there are gaps in availability and service quality, and backhaul to the major Internet peering points is expensive and not always reliable. Though it is home to a high-quality university and community college, its businesses offer limited employment opportunities to graduates, and brain drain is a constant concern.

Combating Brain Drain with Strengths

The Chamber of Commerce is leading an effort to leverage Walla Walla’s existing strengths to create broadband-powered growth. In 2012, thanks to a broadband stimulus grant, the nonprofit Northwest Open Access Network (NoaNet) completed expansion of its fiber backbone into the Walla Walla Valley. The city is now working with carriers, institutions and businesses on ways to roll-out local connectivity to fill gaps and deliver significant bandwidth where needed.

The Chamber established a film office that has already drawn TV and film shoots and is working to attract a full-time production unit for TV, film or Web content as the anchor of a digital media and gaming cluster. Based on the success of winemaking, it is driving the creation of a Plough2Plate program to help small local food producers with marketing, branding and distribution. And it has begun to integrate the Hispanic business community – in a city where 25% of the population is now Latin American – into the mainstream to boost the growth of both Latino and Anglo businesses. Mixing big ambitions with practical steps, Walla Walla is ensuring that its legacy of success extends into an Internet-driven future.

Population: 63,829

Websites: www.ci.walla-walla.wa.us | wwvchamber.com

Smart21 2014

Spokane, the largest city on the east side of Washington State, with a population of 196,000, has long been removed both geographically and economically from the fast-growing Seattle area that includes the City of Redmond, home of software giant Microsoft. The prosperity of the City of Spokane in the 19th and early 20th centuries was based on resource extraction, and its history includes the silver boom, the timber boom and a trading boom that followed the coming of the railroads. Their legacy was a downtown area filled with graceful historic buildings set on wide streets above the magnificent falls of the Spokane River. But the power of Spokane’s traditional industries to create jobs and prosperity had run its course and, by the 1980s, the city was struggling for economic vitality.

Private and Public Investment

The software boom on the west side of the State; however, was dramatizing the existence of new opportunities and a mix of private-sector and far-sighted public-sector investment began to lay the foundations for a new economy. The private sector saw promise in the Spokane area and began installing broadband connectivity, from fiber to XDSL and cable modem service. Public-sector investment included Spokane’s Educational Metropolitan Area Network, a gigabit Ethernet connection to all classrooms in more than 53 schools and colleges, an Inland Northwest Community Access Network that offers Internet access, training and social service resources to the economically disadvantaged; and a state-funded rural fiber network deployed by Inland Northwest Health Services connecting Spokane’s health care community with the region.

Terabyte Triangle

In 1996, a professor at Eastern Washington University, Dr. Steve Simmons, coined the term “Terabyte Triangle” which described Spokane’s 30-block triangular region around the downtown core, which offers one of the densest concentrations of high-speed connectivity in the U.S. Investments valued at more than $1 billion have transformed Spokane, and generated a “Downtown Renaissance” which has launched over 450 new and proposed public and private construction projects to bring new vitality and vigor to downtown Spokane. Building on this regional high-speed infrastructure, Spokane has created a public/private collaboration called the Virtual Possibilities Network, using funding from the local utility, Avista Corporation, in order to donate dark fiber infrastructure for research projects at local universities. And the City itself uses this connectivity for a full range of services from GIS mapping to finding rooms and resources for the homeless, from networking all libraries and community centers to ensuring that police and firefighters have wireless Internet access aboard their vehicles. Through many steps, large and small, Spokane is building broadband into the life of the City, the region and its residents, and using it as a lever to create a more competitive economy.

Population: 196,000

Website: my.spokanecity.org

Top7 2004

Community that developed its own broadband network and is launching development programs on this foundation.

Population: 25,000

Website: www.spanishfork.org

Smart21 2006

A wireless network being built by Earthlink with public backing is making possible 300 Kbps free service to low-income citizens, supported by programs offering affordable PCs, training, support and online services, while paying users receive higher levels of service.

Population: 739,426

Website: sfgov.org

Smart21 2007

San Diego occupies a blessed corner of the United States. With a Mediterranean climate, the city is a tourist destination that drew 32 million visitors in 2012. It hosts the largest naval fleet in the world in its deepwater port, which in turn has attracted major national defense contractors as employers. Bordering on Mexico, San Diego is also the busiest international crossing point in the world and handles the third-highest volume of trade among all US-Mexico land crossings.

This combination has given San Diego an unusually diversified economy, in which defense, tourism, international trade, R&D and manufacturing are the largest sectors. Maintaining its competitive position and quality of life in a fast-changing world, however, is a significant challenge. City government is attacking that challenge on multiple fronts.

Google Fiber

In 2015, San Diego was named a Google Fiber city and began working with Google on a detailed study of regulatory, geographic and other factors that will affect deployment. Google Fiber projects require cities to eliminate permitting and regulatory barriers and to allow Google control over where and when service is deployed.

Career Pathways

While it waits for its fiber future to take shape, the city is focusing on quality of life factors that will shape its potential. California Career Pathways is a collaborative project uniting 14 school districts and 5 community colleges in the region. Funded by a California state grant in 2015, the program covers from kindergarten through community college and develops career pathways into the region’s growth sectors, from advanced manufacturing and clean energy to information and communications technology. It aims to integrate academic and career-based learning and bridge the distance from education to work.

Library Innovation

The San Diego Public Libraries are also investing in a broadband-enabled future that helps drive an innovation economy. The system is engaged in a significant upgrade of online capacity to 100 Mbps at each facility. More importantly, it offers a makerspace, open to the public, providing 3D printers and process tools including vinyl cutters, laser cutters, milling machines and sewing machines. Using this combination of connectivity and hardware, the library has delivered 150 free technology programs to more than 5,000 attendees in the past year, and hosted special events including a Coding Camp, Startup Weekend, Maker Meetups and Robot Days serving hundreds to thousands of citizens.

Challenges to Sustainability

A prolonged drought has brought Californians face-to-face with climate change and the need to manage a more challenging environment. San Diego has responded by making sustainability a social and cultural priority. The city is home to Balboa Park, the largest cultural urban park in the United States and site of the famed San Diego Zoo. A sustainability program launched in 2008 uses the park to conduct sustainability education and engage local arts and cultural organizations in decisions about its future. The city has also achieved US$1.75 million in annual savings and reduced water use by 1.5 million gallons through sustainability investments in the park.

With water becoming more precious by the year, the city embarked on a reuse program called Pure Water San Diego in 2013. City leaders had learned from unsuccessful pilot projects in the past, which were doomed to failure by headlines about “toilet to tap” water. For its new effort, the city developed a comprehensive communications plan and conducted extensive community outreach in person, online and by mail. By the time the Pure Water demonstration project was launched, a poll found that 73% of San Diegans favored water purification to produce a new drinking water supply. A city blessed by circumstance is now finding ways to leverage the skills and passions of its citizens to build an economically and environmentally sustainable future.

Population: 1,356,000

Website: www.sandiego.gov

Smart21 2016

At the end of the last century, Riverside was a bedroom community and university town, agricultural center and warehouse hub in the desert 60 miles from Los Angeles. It also had a large population of poor and poorly educated residents and a signal failure to retain many of the 55,000 graduates leaving its institutions of higher learning.

A High Tech Taskforce

In 2004, the mayor and a community college dean convened a High Tech Taskforce to figure out how to channel some of California's high-tech growth into their community. It became the Riverside Technology CEO Forum, which led a multi-sector effort to change the city's destiny. The city built a fiber network to connect its operations as well as the University Research Park. A free WiFi network now offers up to 1 Mbps service through 1,600 access points, and exploding demand has led multiple commercial carriers to deploy high-speed broadband across the city. Riding the network is an array of award-winning e-government applications, from dynamic traffic management to graffiti tracking and removal.

Riverside has also worked to leverage its universities in multiple ways. College 311, a Web-based hub for educational social and community services, aims to double the number of Riverside youth who complete college. Targeting five knowledge-intensive industries, Riverside and its partners have launched innovation efforts from a highly-acclaimed virtual secondary school to an Innovation Center offering incubation space, business acceleration and interaction with angel and venture investors. These efforts have already attracted 35 high-tech companies and established 20 tech start-ups.

Digital Inclusion

In 2006, Riverside started a digital inclusion program called SmartRiverside, using its free WiFi network, to provide technology training, free computers and software to all of the city's low-income families. Making it happen is Project Bridge, which provides recycled IT equipment to 1,500 new families each year. The equipment is refurbished by reformed gang members, who learn valuable skills; Project Bridge is southern California's largest recycler of e-waste, and the project is funded by eBay sale of excess equipment. From the streets to the research lab, Riverside is ready for the digital age.

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Riverside was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum books Brain Gain and Seizing Our Destiny.

Population: 306,800

Labor Force: 160,700

Website: www.riversideca.gov

Intelligent Community of the Year 2012

Smart21 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012

Top7 2011 | 2012

America’s first capital, Philadelphia is the nation’s fifth largest city, with an estimated gross metropolitan product of US$490 billion.  Its many universities and colleges make it a top study destination.  It serves as headquarters for five Fortune 1000 companies, and its biggest economic sectors include financial services, healthcare, biotech, IT, transportation, manufacturing and tourism.

But these headline numbers do not tell the full story.  Like other old industrial cities, it suffered decades of decline as automation and globalization eliminated low-skilled employment.  Today, 32% of the population is not in the workforce, the second highest percentage in the US after Detroit.  Half of jobs in Philadelphia require a university degree but only 22% of Philadelphians possess one, and the city’s poverty rate is a high 27%.

When he took office in 2008, Mayor Michael Nutter pledged to double the percentage of young people who attended university. Since then, city government has marshaled local and national resources in an effort to break the cycle of low achievement and economic exclusion.  Among these is enlargement of Pre-K programs to reach three and four-year-old unserved children.  The program is funded by a new tax on sweetened beverages.  Out of a target population of 27,000, the program has delivered higher quality care so far to more than 10,000. 

Expanding Access

Nearly half of Philadelphians lack Internet access at home. Having identified broadband as an essential utility in its master plan, the city assembled a coalition of health, social service and community development organizations called the Freedom Rings Partnership. The group successfully applied for broadband stimulus funding, which has been applied to the development of 77 Keyspot Innovation and Technology Centers (KIT Centers) that offer digital inclusion programs in low-income neighborhoods. Each provides access to technology, digital skills education and training in such essentials as job interviewing and keeping a job. Together, they have served 165,000 participants, with an impact that often reaches far beyond basic digital literacy.

In 2021, Verizon became technology partner to the KIT Centers to keep their tech up to date, and the nonprofit Digital Literacy Alliance funded positions for “digital navigators” to offer one-to-one consulting and training.   

Spurring Business Innovation

An Innovation Consulting program launched by the city offers workshops to government and business organizations and consults with clients to improve their stakeholder communication, business processes, and strategic planning.  More than half of workshop attendees are non-governmental. Since 2015, a city-backed Innovation Fund has invested in 29 projects that improve quality of life and and prepare residents for educational success and engagement in the city's future.  On the quality of life side are Rec Radio, a radio station that informs and entertains the community, and an urban wood design competition, in which local youth organization use salvaged wood from city parks to create furniture prototypes.  Residents gain educational preparation from The Achievers Initiative, which helps individual achieve a high school equivalency credential, and a training kit that teaches best practices for volunteer leaders in overcoming barriers to progress in neighborhoods that have traditionally been starved for investment.  

Other public and private investment has gone into redevelopment of the Navy Yard into a green industries park and America’s largest urban solar farm, as well as early development of a learning management system for the public schools. For Philadelphia, the payoff from these programs will be in economic growth, but more importantly, in an increase in the percentage of its citizens that participate in the city’s economic success.

Population: 1,500,000

Website: www.phila.gov

Smart21 2006 | 2013 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022

Northeast Ohio is an 18-county region bordering on one of America's Great Lakes to the north and including the major metropolitan center of Cleveland and the cities of Akron, Canton and Youngstown. To Americans of a certain age, the names of those cities tell the tale of the Industrial Age. This region was one of America's great trade and manufacturing centers, a key link in the national transportation system, home to steel companies and the place where Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller made his fortune. Following the Second World War, however, it fell into seemingly unstoppable decline, particularly in the core urban areas, as US manufacturing lost competitiveness in a global market. Amidst rising unemployment, eroding institutions, population loss and racial unrest, the tremendous wealth created in the industrial era was no longer invested in creating new businesses and industries, nor in education and the development of social capital. In 1978, Cleveland became the first US city to default on its creditors since the Great Depression and, in 2004 and 2006, was named America's poorest big city.

Buried Assets

Yet the region retained hidden strengths: world-class health facilities, a vibrant arts culture, three major professional sports teams and respected institutions of higher learning, including Case Western Reserve University and Oberlin College. Another major asset was buried in a literal sense. During the 1990s, the telecom industry built out more than $4 trillion of fiber-optic communications systems worldwide. In most cases, these circuits followed the traditional transportation corridors such as rail lines and highways, which meant that Northeast Ohio found itself once again at the hub of a high-capacity transportation network.

In 2002, Case Western named as its new chief information officer a visionary named Lev Gonick. With global technology and community development experience on his resume, he soon began outlining a revolutionary idea. He believed that the region's nonprofit institutions could spearhead development of a common community network that would not only save them money and expand capacity but foster a wide range of innovation collaborations. The vision impressed many regional leaders, notable among them Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell. Case Western and the city assembled a core group of institutions including NorTech (an economic development organization focused on technology), Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland State University, the county library system, the local Public Broadcasting System (PBS) affiliate, and Cleveland's transit authority and school district. These were the founding members of a public-private partnership they called OneCleveland, which was eventually renamed OneCommunity. Under the leadership of its president Scot Rourke, OneCommunity forged partnerships with the region's telephone and cable carriers, under which the carriers donated unused fiber-optic circuits to OneCommunity and OneCommunity contracted for last-mile fiber and VPN services from the carriers.

To make the deal, OneCommunity had to overcome resistance to the creation of what carriers at first viewed as a new competitor. Fortunately, Rourke and his team came from the venture capital industry, which allowed them to talk the language of business plans and return on investment. It also ensured OneCommunity began life with a sustainable business model. Eventually, they persuaded all parties of OneCommunity's essential value: by helping the public and nonprofit sectors become better users of IT and telecom services, OneCommunity would save them money while simultaneously boosting demand across the region. And boost demand it did. Lev Gonick reports that, prior to OneCommunity, Case Western was using about 40 megabits per second of capacity for all of its operations. Within a few years of joining the OneCommunity network, average demand had risen to 400 Mbps. Since start-up, the OneCommunity network has expanded to connect more than 1,500 schools, libraries, governments, hospitals and universities. Its OneClassroom content and digital asset management system connects these users to world-class content from the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Orchestra, PBS and other sources. In 2006-07, the network hosted an 18-month program called Voices & Choices, which engaged tens of thousands of area leaders in Web-enabled "town meetings" in order to educate people about the challenges facing the regional economy and obtain their input. Voices & Choices has led to a regional economic development plan called Advance Northeast Ohio, which focuses on business growth and attraction, talent development, inclusion and government collaboration for greater efficiency.

Intensive Collaboration

OneCommunity would be impressive just as a story of network deployment - but it would not have achieved the potential that its creators envisioned. Because OneCommunity's Board is made up of the leading governmental and nonprofit institutions of the region, it became the hub of intensive collaboration. Today, the work of tech-based economic development agency NorTech, for example, is complemented by Team NEO, a joint venture of the largest metro chambers of commerce, which works to attract business investment in targeted sectors. Another nonprofit, JumpStart, provides venture capital to start-up companies with high growth potential. In 2006, it tied for ninth among the 100 most active investors making first-time investments in start-up or early-stage companies, according to Entrepreneur magazine, up from 61st place in 2005. Meanwhile, private investor Morgenthaler Ventures, founded in Cleveland with offices in Silicon Valley's Menlo Park, tied for 11th most active on the Entrepreneur list.

BioEnterprise is another nonprofit partnership, founded by The Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western and Summa Health Systems. It supports business formation, recruitment and acceleration for emerging medical device, biotechnology and health care service firms. Since its founding in 2002, it has created, recruited or accelerated more than 60 companies, helped them attract more than $565 million in funding, and concluded over 225 technology transfer deals with industry partners.

Rebuilding an Entrepreneurial Culture

In November, OneCommunity announced that it would share with the Northeast Ohio Regional Health Information Organization (NEO RHIO) an $11.2 million grant from the US Federal Communications Commission to develop a regional broadband health care network. The network will connect 19 rural hospitals and numerous clinics in 22 counties to over 30 existing hospitals already on the OneCommunity network. The project will enable NEO RHIO and its collaborating medical providers to deliver telemedicine, records access, medical imaging and remote diagnostic services to improve community health care. At the same time, it creates the opportunity for the region to become a center of excellence in the emerging business of electronic patient records management.

The efforts of OneCommunity and its partners are all directed to the same goal: rebuilding the business, political and social culture of entrepreneurship that created the region's Industrial Age prosperity. In the Broadband Economy, that takes a different set of assets and skills, from broadband to partnerships to digital literacy. It also takes long-term investment in human and social capital. But the partners are betting that same spirit that drove the region's earlier success can create a sustainable and inclusive economy in the 21st Century.

Population: 4,600,000

Labor Force: 2,125,400

Website: www.onecommunity.org

Smart21 2008 | 2011

Top7 2008

The US capital of finance, publishing and broadcast television, New York launched investments in the late 1990s to build a digital economy. In 1995, the city created a venture fund, the Plug ‘n’ Go program, which offered affordable, pre-wired, Internet-ready office space to young companies, and “Digital New York: Wired to the World,” which provides seed funding to create new high-tech clusters in the rest of the city outside Manhattan.

Population: 8,063,000

Website: www.nyc.gov

Intelligent Community of the Year 2001

Small farming community with aggressive re-generation program.

Population: 9,841

Website: www.cityofmonmouth.com

Smart21 2006