When you watch ICF’s videos on Youtube, what you see publicly are representatives from a city celebrating when their city is named Intelligent Community of the Year. Sometimes, as in the case of the mayor of Espoo, Finland, you see tears of joy. Sometimes, you see Eindhoven representatives from The Netherlands donning red shirts in celebration or Columbus representatives from Ohio storming the stage behind their mayor like a football club.

What you do not see is the incredibly hard work done by a group of people from around the world to analyze the information from these cities, assess it and judge them for you, the world’s media and other aspiring places. They are the ICF Analysts and Jurors, the heart and soul – and the brains – of the ICF Awards program.

When you watch ICF’s videos on Youtube, what you see publicly are representatives from a city celebrating when their city is named Intelligent Community of the Year. Sometimes, as in the case of the mayor of Espoo, Finland, you see tears of joy. Sometimes, you see Eindhoven representatives from The Netherlands donning red shirts in celebration or Columbus representatives from Ohio storming the stage behind their mayor like a football club.

What you do not see is the incredibly hard work done by a group of people from around the world to analyze the information from these cities, assess it and judge them for you, the world’s media and other aspiring places. They are the ICF Analysts and Jurors, the heart and soul – and the brains – of the ICF Awards program.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Idoia Postigo, Director General at Bilbao Metropoli-30. Idoia shares the story of how Bilbao recovered from industrial decline and revitalized itself into a city that won the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize in 2010.

In part 2, Chairman and CEO of Toronto’s Institute Without Boundaries and now the Brookfield Sustainability Institute Luigi Ferrara talks about sustainability, why we are far away from it and what Brookfield is going to do to move it into the consciousness of communities.

Chairman and CEO of Toronto’s Institute Without Boundaries and now the Brookfield Sustainability Institute Luigi Ferrara dives deep into how cities are being rebuilt and redesigned for sustainability and why Europe and Asia lead North American communities in this important area.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Craig Taylor, best-selling author of Londoners and, most recently, New Yorkers: A City and its People in Our Time. To tell the story of New York City post-9/11 and -COVID, Craig lived in New York City for over 5 years and immersed himself in the city’s extraordinary soup. New Yorkers is a series of interviews with 200 people from every class, race and corner of the city. Craig came away amazed at The Big Apple and says, “A New York life well lived is an accomplishment like no other.”

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Krista Nightengale, Executive Director at the Better Block Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to showing communities how to build a more walkable, bikeable, liveable neighborhood to improve quality of life and attract talent.

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina is one of America’s most trusted epidemiologists. She publishes Your Local Epidemiologist, a widely read website and newsletter covering a range of public health issues that translates evolving science into readable language for the general public. In this episode of The Intelligent Community, she discusses information integrity and the politics of COVID in places as diverse as New York and Florida. This episode is the second part of ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla’s interview with Dr. Jetelina. Listen to Part 1.

Now that COVID is no longer a global pandemic, what is it? And what is the lesson communities learned over the past 3 years? In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, Director of Population Health Analytics, to learn these answers and more.