Founded in 1861 by Father Albert Lacome, the city of St. Albert is a striking blend of culture, history and community. St. Albert began as a small town around the Father Lacombe Chapel—which stills stands today on Mission Hill—in the Sturgeon River valley northwest of Edmonton and grew into the second-largest city in the Edmonton Metropolitan Region. In addition to the Father Lacombe Chapel, the city is home to the St. Albert Grain Elevator Park, which houses two historic grain elevators. But for a city rich in historical sites, St. Albert is most defined by its community of residents constantly striving to improve life and embrace new innovation. St. Albert Place, located at the heart of the city, is a classic example of this attitude. It was designed by a world-renowned architect as a “people place” from the start and currently houses the St. Albert Public Library where residents can gather to learn about new technologies and opportunities in the modern world. This gathering of residents from local government positions, local businesses, academia and the general public has produced St. Albert’s Smart City Master Plan.

Access for All

A core component of St. Albert’s Smart City Master Plan is providing high-speed Internet access throughout the community. St. Albert has created its own municipal fiber optic network, which now connects half of the city’s municipal buildings, intersections and assets. The city plans to expand this coverage to all assets in the near future. St. Albert is also using this network to offer licensed wholesale access to community groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and local school districts, as well as to industry.

In addition to fiber, the city is expanding its cellular service infrastructure, including building new towers, new fiber backhaul, and new microcell installations to allow citizens to use their wireless cell service everywhere. St. Albert is working with service providers as part of this initiative to offer free Wi-Fi service in public places throughout the community with most free Wi-Fi locations now up and running.

Training the Workforce of the Future

St. Albert has developed several programs to help train its younger citizens for future careers and to assist young entrepreneurs in the more difficult phases of starting up. The city operates the Collective facility where local youth can access a series of Marketplace programs. The programs include skill-building workshops—such as Ready to Rent, a course that provides education and resources for finding and maintaining housing—counselling and outreach, entrepreneurship training with highly qualified mentors available and the Building Assets and Memories (BAM) program. The BAM program has attracted dozens of youth members who have organized retreats, a youth-issues conference, foreign missions and many popular community events. In addition to these programs, the Collective provides meeting spaces for youth to gather and exchange ideas and for entrepreneurs to get started on their companies.

Fostering an Innovation Ecosystem

To attract innovators to the city as well as provide an ideal environment for local entrepreneurs, St. Albert has partnered with residents and academic and industry leaders to establish itself as a “living lab.” Entrepreneurs and innovators can test their products, ideas, and commercialization plans in the city, making it an attractive place to build new businesses. Since becoming a living lab, St. Albert has seen resident entrepreneurs form an Innovation Council. Working together with the local chamber of commerce, business incubator and university, the Innovation Council launched the St. Albert Innovation Forum in 2017, an event open to the whole community where residents can share new ideas and debate policies for future competitiveness in the city. The Innovation Council has also created a Capital Partnership Program, a new platform to help innovators attract investors.

Digital Literacy at the Public Library

With Internet service rapidly approaching 100% availability in St. Albert, the city has turned to its library to train residents to use all the new technologies available to them. The St. Albert Public Library offers a wide array of digital literacy programs, including classes on using email, mobile devices, social media, Google apps and Microsoft Office products, as well as introductory programming, coding and game design courses. In addition to attending classes at the library, residents can also make use of the library’s Outreach Literacy Van, a mobile classroom staffed by a Community Outreach Librarian. The Literacy Van visits schools, clubs, churches and other community centers and provides a total of 60 different technology literacy programs with more being added each year. The library is currently planning a drop-in Makerspace program focusing on virtual reality, robotics and other emerging technologies to be launched sometime in 2018.

In addition to classes, the St. Albert Public Library has expanded its technological services, providing 45 public workstations with free Wi-Fi access for patrons. In 2017, these workstations saw more than 34,000 Internet work sessions. People have always been St. Albert’s greatest resource, and the city continues to nurture that resource, helping residents achieve their greatest potential and improve life for all.

Population: 65,589

Website: https://stalbert.ca

Smart21 2018

Global think tank, the International Community Forum (ICF), has crowned Parramatta as one of 21 smart communities in the world at its annual Intelligent Community of the Year Awards Program hosted in Canada.

This is the first time Parramatta has appeared in the prestigious list and it's the only Australian city named among 20 other communities from nine countries across the world including Brazil, Canada, Iceland, Spain, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Turkey and the USA.

Limburg is one of the world's most innovative regions. Every year, the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) selects 21 regions worldwide that excel in innovation, knowledge development, and sustainability. Limburg is part of this selection - the so-called Smart21 - and has been nominated for the title of 'The Intelligent Community of the Year'.

Grey County has been named one of the Smart21 Communities of 2025 by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF).

The recognition highlights cities and regions using technology and innovation to drive growth and improve quality of life.

For the third consecutive year and fourth time since 2017, Grey County has been named one of the world’s Smart21 communities of the year by the Intelligent Communities Forum (ICF). The announcement came on March 6 at the Communities in Transition conference in Hamilton, Ontario.

Smart, we are in Durham Region. Kingston too. We know this because the global Intelligent Communities Forum had us tested.

For the fourth year in a row the Region of Durham has been recognized as one of the Smart 21 Communities in the world, an honour that speaks to the “innovation and partnership” happening in the region, which has embraced a ‘technology for all’ philosophy.

Communities from nine nations over five continents named as semi-finalists in ICF’s annual Intelligent Community of the Year Awards Program

(March 6, 2025 – New York, NY, USA & Hamilton, ON, Canada) – At the conclusion of a conference hosted by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), Artefact Social and the Hamilton Technology Centre, ICF today named the world’s Smart21 Communities of 2025. The announcement was made at a special evening event after the Communities in Transition conference in the host city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

The selection of the Smart21 Communities of the Year begins the semi-finalist phase in ICF’s annual Awards Program. In June, ICF will announce the Top7 Intelligent Communities as finalists in the Awards program at the Top7 Conference & Announcement in Las Rozas de Madrid, Spain. The program will conclude when ICF names the 2025 Intelligent Community of the Year at the ICF Global Summit in Binh Duong, Vietnam in October. One of these twenty-one communities named today will succeed Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, the 2024 Intelligent Community of the Year.

Each year, the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) Awards Program offers a series of high-profile events to inspire and connect leaders from across the globe. Mark your calendars for these key conferences in the 2025 Awards cycle, each hosted in an Intelligent Community renowned for its forward-thinking initiatives and unique contributions to the global Intelligent Community movement.

Coquitlam is one of the world’s Smart21 communities for a third year.

Last month, at the end of the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) in Taiwan, the organization announced five Canadian municipalities, counties and regions had made the annual list as a digital leader:

Yunlin County, comprised of 19 townships and the county seat of Douliu, is found on the fertile Chianan Plain on the western coast of Taiwan. Its rich farmland and many rivers have made the county an agrarian center, producing crops such as pomelo, tea leaves, suan cai, papaya and melon and also housing a large number of fisheries and fishing ports along the coastline. Yunlin County’s land is prized for its beauty in addition to its bounty, and the county is home to the first temple theme park of Taiwan, as well as some of the most prominent Mazu temples in the country. Yunlin also houses the nation’s largest agarwood forest park and the magnificent Penglai Waterfall in Penny’s Water Creek Valley.

Outside of agriculture, Yunlin County has long placed emphasis on its education system, and the county is home to 4 universities, dozens of secondary and hundreds of primary schools and the National Yunlin Special Education School. In the 21st century, the county has focused ever harder on education and connectivity to become a place where innovation thrives.

Smart Campuses Prepare Students for High-Tech Work

In recent years, Yunlin County has made significant strides in ensuring robust broadband access across its educational institutions. The county has transformed all of its elementary and middle schools into smart campuses, providing 100% wireless network coverage in those schools and over 30,000 tablets for students under a Learning Device Management System. All 187 elementary and middle schools have also introduced smart student ID cards, which allow parents to access the Smart Campus App to stay informed and involved with their children’s education.

Yunlin County’s Smart Education Center, branded as the Starbase of Crescent Harbor, is a pioneering facility that immerses students in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) emerging technologies. Its specialized facilities cover Artificial Intelligence, the Metaverse, 3D Making, Smart Agriculture, Future Life and STEAM Handicrafts. The integration of these resources aims to furnish every student with a sound technological foundation before graduation. Further reinforcing these efforts, Yunlin has instituted a unique Information and Life Technology curriculum for 3rd to 6th graders, standardizing it across all schools beginning in the 2022 academic year. The county has simultaneously focused on more advanced digital training for teachers with a series of workshops, supported by the Office for Digital Learning Promotion, that teach digital learning methodologies. As of 2024, nearly 5,000 teachers across the county have completed one or more of these workshops. These initiatives have culminated in notable recognition at the "Autonomous Learning Festival," underlining Yunlin's success in digitally empowering both teachers and students.

The county government is also developing its higher education resources by collaborating with the National Yunlin University of Science and Technology and National Formosa University to develop better courses for technical professionals and create more industrial-academic internships for students. The universities are also actively working with local industries to create special classes based on the manpower needs of those industries. From 2019 to 2022, local universities hosted corporate training courses for 22 companies with 1,757 attendees. University students also have the opportunity to work with local industries on key technology remodeling activities to improve both the students’ grasp of such technologies and the companies’ efficiency.

Agricultural Innovation for a Sustainable Future

Yunlin County is a leader in agricultural productivity and innovation, with 2022 seeing an agricultural output of approximately NT$89 billion. Despite challenges posed by an aging agricultural workforce and climate change, the county is proactively pursuing "low-carbon, carbon-negative agriculture" and "smart agriculture." Yunlin County established the Climate Change Response Office in 2021 to spearhead these initiatives, promoting regional collaboration and smart governance measures to align with Taiwan's net zero emissions by 2050 ambitions. At the same time, the government held seminars with local industry leaders, farmer groups and community representatives to create an agricultural vision for the future that included input from all parties.

In 2022, the county signed an MOU with Nahua University to provide carbon footprinting devices, third-party verification and suggestions based on the results for local agricultural businesses. Then in 2023, they partnered with YunTech to establish the Yunlin Zero Waste Transformation Integrated Services Hub, which provides a one-stop platform for businesses to access sustainability assistance and guidance. The platform allows businesses to apply for government subsides, including those available through the MOEA Industrial Development Bureau’s Manufacturing Sector Promotion Plan for Net Zero Transformation and the 1+N Carbon Management Project. In 2023 alone, Yunlin County held training sessions for 33 local businesses and helped secure approximately NT$47 million in government subsidies to help them establish greener practices.

On the innovation side, Yunlin County is developing climate-smart agriculture (CSA), intelligent agricultural management technologies and integrating information and communication technologies (ICT) to digitize some agricultural production elements and implement smart controls to improve operations. As of 2024, the county has completed eight smart automation agricultural projects, including developing Smart Greenhouses outfitted with IoT technologies and environmental sensors to monitor control systems as well as temperature, humidity and soil conductivity. Another project established Smart Poultry Houses with two local companies. These locations use IoT to monitor conditions for the animals and also provide cleaning services, allowing four people to manage up to 50,000 livestock and protecting against labor shortages.

Engaging Youth in the Future of Yunlin

Community participation is at the heart of Yunlin County's development philosophy. The Local Revitalization Office, established in 2019, has been instrumental in organizing over 400 consensus meetings with civil society, fostering a collaborative approach to shaping Yunlin's future. The county has focused particularly on increasing youth participation in the community. Yunlin County established the Central Youth Hub in April 2023, which serves as an event venue with public facilities and classrooms for rent. Public- and private-sector partnerships have also funded co-working spaces in the Hub to give young entrepreneurs a place to gather and work on their ideas. To further facilitate entrepreneurial development and interest in starting businesses locally in Yunlin County, the government commissioned YunTech to create a Yunlin Youth Entrepreneurship Subsidy and Cultivation project, which provides funding to residents age 20-40 who are starting businesses in the county. This initiative has empowered 22 young individuals to realize their entrepreneurial aspirations across diverse fields, instilling both determination and confidence in the county's youth to remain and thrive within their hometowns.

The Central Youth Hub hosts many local talent development activities, including Master Trend Lectures, 14 Lessons for Young People, Local Culture Exploration and Investigation and Exchange Life Experience, all of which are aimed at promoting awareness of local issues and taking initiative in the younger generations. The Hub also collaborates with experts from various fields to provide vocational counseling services via phone or in person.

Yunlin County provides a prime example of how rural regions can leverage technology, education, community engagement and innovative practices to foster comprehensive growth and development while maintaining the strength of their cultural heritage and traditional industries.

Population: 664,963

Website: www.yunlin.gov.tw

Smart21 2024

Top7 2024