ICF Names the Smart21 Communities of 2024
Communities from seven nations over five continents named as semi-finalists in ICF’s annual Intelligent Community of the Year Awards Program
(March 20, 2024 – New York, NY, USA & Taipei, Taiwan) – At the conclusion of a conference hosted by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), the ICF Taiwan organization and the ICF Institute in Taiwan, ICF today named the world’s Smart21 Communities of 2024. The announcement was made at the conclusion of the Smart Cities and Intelligent Communities conference, conducted as part of the Taiwan Smart City Summit & Expo in Taipei.
The selection of the annual Smart21 Communities of the Year marks the semi-finalist phase in ICF’s annual Awards Program. The program will conclude when ICF names the 2024 Intelligent Community of the Year at the ICF Summit in November. One of these 21 communities named today will succeed Binh Duong, Vietnam, the 2023 Intelligent Community of the Year.
Read moreICF’s Taiwan Institute and ICF Taiwan Partner with ICF to Bring an International Delegation to Smart City Summit and Expo
The Smart City Summit and Expo (SCSE) in Taipei is one of the largest conferences and expositions for smart city technology and trends in the world, taking place in a nation that produces 60% of the world’s semiconductors. From March 19 through 22, SCSE will host 150,000 visitors at convention centers in Taipei and Kaohsiung. Joining them will be an ICF delegation from cities, technology companies, universities and public-private accelerators organized in partnership with the ICF Institute in Taiwan and the national organization ICF Taiwan.
Fairfield named to Smart21 list for most innovative cities
FAIRFIELD — Fairfield received a prestigious honor in February when it was named one of the most innovative cities in the world by the Intelligent Community Forum.
The organization named Fairfield to its list of “Smart21 Communities of 2023” during a virtual conference on Feb. 23. Fairfield was one of five cities in the United States to be named among the Top 21, which also included cities in countries such as Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam and more.
Read moreBinh Duong in world’s top 21 Intelligent Communities for five consecutive years
ICF gathers nearly 200 prosperous smart cities in the world. ICF studied and assessed hundreds of cities around the world to select the best practices of the world's Intelligent Communities based on six factors including broadband connectivity, knowledge workforce, innovation, digital equality, sustainability, and advocacy.
Read moreICF Names the Smart21 Communities of 2023
Communities from eight nations over five continents named as semi-finalists in ICF’s annual Intelligent Community of the Year Awards Program
(February 23, 2023 – New York, NY, USA) – At the conclusion of a virtual conference hosted by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) and co-hosted by Economic Development Australia (EDA) and the Economic Developers Association of Canada (EDAC), ICF today named the world’s Smart21 Communities of 2023.
The selection of the annual Smart21 Communities of the Year marks the semi-finalist phase in ICF’s annual Awards Program. The program will conclude when ICF names the 2023 Intelligent Community of the Year in October at the ICF Summit. One of these 21 communities named today will succeed New Taipei City, the 2022 Intelligent Community of the Year.
Read moreEstevan among the 21 top innovative communities in the world
ESTEVAN - Estevan has been selected as a Smart 21 Community for 2022 by the Intelligent Community Forum.
The exciting news was announced during the grand opening of the Southeast Innovation Business Development Centre on May 18.
Estevan became the first community in Saskatchewan to make it to the top, and city Coun. Rebecca Foord, who is also a part of the city's innovation council, said they are now trying to make it to the top seven and then hope to be named the No 1 Intelligent Community for 2022.
Read moreSeat Pleasant, Maryland
Seat Pleasant was known in its early days as Chesapeake Junction, as it was the home of the first Chesapeake Beach Railway station. The city’s fortunes have long been tied to travel, first to the railway, which brought enough growth for incorporation in the 1930s before it closed down, and then to the George Palmer Highway, later renamed the Martin Luther King Jr. Highway. Seat Pleasant has suffered from many of the troubles common to small cities in semi-rural areas, such as low access to broadband connectivity and difficulties connecting people with other services. But like its early namesake, the city aims to become a new sort of junction in the modern world, a place where people and services connect to bring growth and hope to a stronger community.
Creating Partnerships through the Center for Government Synergism
Due to its small size, Seat Pleasant has limited resources and has therefore focused on making best use of what it has available. The City government created The Center for Government Synergism (CGS) in 2017 to promote easy cooperation between government, businesses, non-profits, educational institutions and all citizens. CGS uses data sharing, including that collected by IoT sensors, to help with all levels of decision making for the city. Since its establishment, CGS has directed the creation of the “My Seat Pleasant” app connected to a Smart City Platform titled “The Shared Services Hub.” The “My Seat Pleasant” app provides Seat Pleasant residents, businesses and city employees with multiple online features, including services requests, a library of city codes, a city document library, city directory, on-demand broadcast notifications, garbage/recycling and snow removal schedules, city job listings, an online payment portal and event and activity listings. With access to so much more data through the app, citizens and businesses are kept informed and are provided with easy ways to connect with the government and share opinions and suggestions for future legislation and other efforts.
Becoming a Test Bed of Innovation
To encourage innovation and outside investment, Seat Pleasant has branded itself the “Test Bed of Innovation,” by providing support for start-ups and established companies wishing to test new technologies and solutions. Since rebranding, the City has become host to several pilot projects, including a partnership between AECOM, Verizon and PEPCO to set up smart street light project for energy savings and intelligent traffic and public safety solutions. Another pilot project, established in partnership with the Greater Washington Board of Trade, has created digital city kiosks throughout Seat Pleasant to provide additional information to supplement the “My Seat Pleasant” app. A local IoT company, WIOMAX, in partnership with the NIST GCTC Project, launched a pilot project in Seat Pleasant for traffic management solutions, aiming to optimize the flow of vehicle, pedestrian and cyclist traffic at key intersections throughout the city.
Providing Education and Health Services for the Chronically Underserved
The City has taken further steps as the “Test Bed of Innovation” by partnering with local education institutions to create a Smart Cities Curriculum for adult retraining and advancement at Prince George’s Community College and a Remote Health Monitoring Program in partnership with the same institution and Harrisburg University. The Smart Cities Curriculum provides training in business process improvement and a high-level overview of cyber-physical systems, sensor technologies, cloud computing, data storage, data mining and business analytics as well as security and privacy challenges related to IoT. The course also explores how digital devices and data analytics can serve the needs of businesses and society and how city government can make use of data visualization to make intelligent economic and strategic decisions. Upon completing the course, students earn a certification that qualifies them for entry-level technology jobs in the Smart City space.
Seat Pleasant’s Remote Health Monitoring (RHM) program aims to promote wellness and provide access to timely, necessary health care services for aging citizens and those with disabilities. The RHM program focuses on using remote patient monitoring technology, assistive technologies, wearable IoT devices and connected devices. The data provided by these devices inform caregivers of any serious issues in time to act while allowing the residents wearing them to go about their daily lives comfortably and independently.
To further facilitate these programs and others, Seat Pleasant is leveraging its designations as an Opportunity Zone and a distressed community to access programs such as the FCC’s Lifeline program in an effort to promote greater broadband adoption. The City is also working to deploy 5G and city-wide Wifi services free of charge for impoverished citizens to support its many innovative programs. Connecting citizens, government and local businesses is at the heart of Seat Pleasant’s Intelligent Community journey, and the city strives every day to strengthen those connections for a more prosperous future.
Population: 4,721
Website: www.seatpleasantmd.gov
Smart21 2022
Photo by Famartin. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
How Broadband Access Unites and Divides Us
The pandemic revealed the essential role of broadband today. It also exposed as never before the dire consequences of the digital divide and the explosive impact of social media in spreading misinformation, fear and outrage. Panelists discuss what the pandemic has taught them about making broadband access more equitable and managing its downsides.
East Central Region, Minnesota
The East Central Region of Minnesota encompasses 5 counties: Chisago, Isanti, Kanabec, Mille Lacs and Pine. Like many regions of the midwestern United States, the East Central Minnesota has long had a primarily agricultural and mining-focused economy, and though the area’s iron deposits are now depleted, dairy, corn and soybean farms still dot the region, as well as paper production companies due to the region’s many softwood forests, including the Chippewa National Forest. East Central Minnesota has more recently focused on a growing tourism industry to support the area during economic transition, as the region is home to many beautiful lakes.
When local mining and, to a lesser extent, agricultural industries began to fail, the East Central Region shifted toward a service-based economy like many of its fellow U.S. communities, but the region aims to turn hardship into an opportunity for growth and attracting new industries. Beginning in 2001, the 5 counties of the region formed the Northern Technology Initiative, which is today known as GPS 45:93, the longitude and latitude coordinates of where they all meet. GPS 45:93 includes city and council economic development managers, private companies and public entities, community and regional organizations, workforce and tribal partners, all working together to improve East Central Minnesota’s ability to compete in a modern economy and attract new businesses and infrastructure investments.
Connecting Residents with the Tools to Succeed
Like many regions with major rural stretches, East Central Minnesota has struggled to bring reliable broadband access to its residents. Many citizens in the region have little access to computers or internet services, leaving them unable to participate in an increasing online economy.
While the county governments work to find the best solution for connectivity, the East Central Regional Library (ECRL) system has worked to the fill the gaps in access for all citizens. The system consists of 14 library branches and 8 outreach sites across the 5 counties as well as neighboring Aitkin. The ECRL provides access to computers, broadband internet service including free wireless access within the library branches and technical support and assistance, as well as intermittent technology training classes. The library system’s website (ecrlib.org) connects library card users to research databases such as EBSCO and Gale, online learning classes including Universal Class, Hoonuit and Mango languages and a large collection of eBooks, eAudiobooks and eMagazines containing a wealth of information and research materials. Library staff provide in-person assistance for those looking to use the ECRL’s wealth of services and also provide chat reference services 24/7 through the statewide AskMN service. Just over 50% of the region’s citizens have active library cards, and many of the library resources are accessible even without one, leading to nearly 500,000 library visits across the region in 2018 alone.
Training the Next Generation Workforce
To support a changing economy, East Central Minnesota needs workers trained in a wide variety of new and traditional skills. GPS 45:93’s workforce committee established the Innovative Approaches to Career Readiness program in 2017 and held its first event in May 2018. The event featured speakers from local high schools and academies with innovative programs already established to assist students in identifying career paths available to them in the region and providing them with appropriate advice and training. Innovative Approaches to Career Readiness aimed to bring representatives from regional high schools and local businesses together in collaboration so that high schools could create new programs to help teach the skills local businesses particularly need to succeed. GPS 45:93 followed up the May event with a tour of Cardinal Manufacturing at the Eleva-Strom High School, a student-run manufacturing company.
The region held the second Innovative Approaches to Career Readiness event in May of 2019, showcasing a panel of new schools and their students sharing programs and projects. The second event highlighted students from a culinary program, a nursing assistant program, multiple apprenticeships and CEO programs. Presenters also shared region labor market and training information, and GPS 45:93 announced the availability of grant funding for schools to start new career initiatives and projects in the future, with 3 schools receiving such grants in the same year they were announced.
Collaborating to Reduce Regional Waste
The 5 counties of East Central Minnesota joined together to form the East Central Solid Waste Commission in 1988 with the goal of establishing solid-waste disposal and recycling programs for the region. Since its founding, the commission has created joint recycling centers, landfills and compost disposal areas, as well as providing collection services for construction and demolition debris and methane for fuel production. It has passed resolutions making on-site disposal of garbage illegal, reducing many of the negative side effects of solid waste disposal throughout the region. With its infrastructure firmly in place, the commission now focuses on education and institutional awareness, providing training in best practices for disposal to promote public health and cost effectiveness. The East Central Solid Waste Commission also serves as the region’s manager for sustainability program grant applications and opportunities such as Green Corps. Residential recycling in the East Central Region has increased by 30% since instituting these training and education programs, with 88% of local businesses recycling paper, 60% recycling plastics, 47% recycling metal and glass and 38% recycling special items such as electronics and batteries. Providing convenient means to recycle such specialized items is the East Central Solid Waste Commission’s next goal for the future.
In times of increasing economic uncertainty, the East Central Region of Minnesota has focused first and foremost on itself as a community, bolstering opportunities for residents to meet whatever the future holds in store.
Population: 165,989
Website: gps4593.com
Smart21 2022
Elefsina, Attica
Elefsina, known to the Greeks as Eleusis, is a suburb of Athens, home to 30,000 people. It is a major industrial area, where most crude oil in Greece is imported and refined. Generations of unfettered industrial development has left a legacy of abandoned factories. But the European Union also named it one of three 2021 Cultural Capitals of Europe because of its rich history as a religious center and its establishment in 1975 of the Aeschylia, one of the most important theater festivals in Greece. It honors the tragic poet Aeschylus, who was born in the city.
With carbon-reduction goals crimping the growth potential of oil, the city is turning to the ICF Method to expand its economy in new directions.
A New Generation of Innovators
An early-stage adopter of the Method, Elefsina is focused on building the key components of a skilled workforce and innovation ecosystem. It is adequately served by three broadband providers, though the costs of connectivity remain high. In 2021, the city put that bandwidth to work with the launch of an Innovation Hackathon focused on smart city solutions, sustainability and agri-food and agri-tourism. Fourteen middle and high schools created teams and developed business ideas in a competition judged by university professors and entrepreneurs. As part of the program, students studied business creation and planning, business models, how to define and pitch a value proposition and basics of finance and investment.
In 2021, Elefsina hosted the third annual edition of StartupNow Forum, the largest innovation, entrepreneurship and technology conference in Greece. The conference features a Startup Innovation Competition, which evaluates the best startups in the country. The October event marked Elefsina’s “coming out” as a contender in technology innovation.
Opening the Gate
In the same year, Elefsina used national government funding to launch a Business Education and Business Gate program. The content being developed includes financial evaluation tools and briefings on national and European Union sources of funding. The Business Gate is a matchmaking program that connects local companies with each other and businesses from neighboring municipalities.
This Athens suburbs has outlined a roadmap that, with vigorous execution, can build a more diverse and innovative economy. Elefsina seeks nothing less than a local economy that, leveraging its proximity to the nation’s capital, can also stand proudly on its own.
Population: 30,000
Website: elefsina.gr/
Smart21 2022
Photo by Davide Mauro. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.