Part of the 2025 ICF Delegation meeting with New Taipei City’s Mayor Hou
 

For the past three years, the Intelligent Community Forum has taken a delegation to attend the annual Smart City Summit & Expo and Net Zero City Expo (SCSE) in Taipei. From a small, largely Canadian delegation in the first year, the past two years have attracted significant numbers of international attendees to be part of ICF’s Delegation to the SCSE and associated site visits. This year, thirty-one delegates from Canada, USA, Brazil, Spain, and the Netherlands joined ICF Canada and ICF Taiwan’s organizers to attend the SCSE and undertake visits to meet the mayors of Taoyuan, New Taipei City, and Yunlin County. In each of these gatherings, in addition to the formalities, the mayors explained why their communities have become among the best smart cities and Intelligent Communities in Taiwan. They noted that they are leading in applying digital communications technologies in health, emergency response, education, traffic control, urban planning, and overall quality of life for their citizens. As the delegation learned over the course of their visit to Taiwan – these communities excel in not only digital connectivity and AIoT applications, they also train knowledge workers and the talent to innovate and become global entrepreneurs. And with innovation, they share their prosperity with all of their citizens who have developed a culture of engagement and respect for sustainability, all key factors of smart cities to evolve into true Intelligent Communities.
 

Taoyuan has kicked off an exciting initiative “She smart Taoyuan”, further in collaborating with gender perspective into city and policy design and celebrating what women have accomplished in this field.

Taoyuan has kicked off an exciting initiative “She smart Taoyuan”, further in collaborating with gender perspective into city and policy design and celebrating what women have accomplished in this field.

Taoyuan, Taiwan & New York, USA – 10 January 2022 - Topics such as net-zero carbon emission and sustainability have become key issues to the global community. Undeterred by the coronavirus pandemic, Department of Information Technology of Taoyuan City Government partnered with the internationally acclaimed ICF as a front runner in 2022. As a prelude to the Smart City Summit & Expo 2022 held in Taiwan, Taoyuan City will co-host with ICF the series of “Taoyuan x ICF: City-Leaders Conversation” with fellow intelligent communities on how to best respond to the challenges at hand.

In this video, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla discusses COVID-19 and Taiwan with Ema Hsieh, Director of the ICF Institute in Taiwan.

At the beginning of the New Year in 2020 we were looking at the threat of war rising out of the rhetoric coming out of Washington and from Tehran. I had a flight planned to travel to Kuwait in January to give a keynote address as part of the Kuwait Public Policy Center’s Lecture Series at the General Secretariat of the Supreme Council for Planning & Development in Kuwait. See: https://lnkd.in/esEVzzn. As the tensions grew and missiles were fired that downed Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 on Jan. 8, I debated my flight to Kuwait, which neighbors Iran on the Persian Gulf. Ultimately, I made the trip via Cairo and spent an uneventful, but very enlightening, week in Kuwait. Upon my return we immediately had another crisis to deal with – whether or not the ICF Institute-organized ICF TOP7 event in Taoyuan, Taiwan would continue or not due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla talks with Ema Hsieh about the upcoming Top7 Announcement in Taoyuan, Taiwan in February. Then, we go to last year's Summit to learn more about Taoyuan, the 2019 Intelligent Community of the Year.

As cities and regions continue to grow, one of its key economic and city-building drivers will be “airport cities”, known as an aerotropolis. These are massive projects that bring together major free trade zones and logistics activities. They also often bring together air, rail and road connectivity making them very desirable locations for businesses and for high-value products and related light-weight manufacturing and assembly activities that can be efficiently shipped by air cargo. But these airport cities or aerotropolis developments can also bring together other aspects of city building, such as entertainment, restaurants, markets and educational facilities. As a virtual city, it will also be filled with people who may wish to reside in or near an exciting aerotropolis requiring places for everyday shopping, culture and health-related facilities.

The price of freedom in any culture, society or community ultimately comes down to the cost of people being able to make the right choice for themselves and for future generations.

A Supreme Court justice once said that, while the USA’s Constitution was inspired, it did not come with a guarantee that people and places would automatically prosper. It ensured that the people, of whom the government was for, would be protected to make any choice they sought best.

“If people want to go to Hell, I will help them,” he added. “It’s my job.”

At ICF we turned that phrase around by declaring that, “If places want to prosper and get on the path to prosperity and stability, we will show them a method for doing it.”

But it can be Hell to get there.

TAOYUAN, Taiwan, July 5, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Gogoro®, a technology leader transforming how innovation is accelerating the shift to sustainable urban mobility, today announced GoShare®, the first fully integrated mobility sharing platform and solution designed and operated as a single platform that provides a key strategic component to smart city ecosystems. 

"Cities around the world have proven consumer demand for mobility sharing but few have established a business model or deployed a solution that demonstrates ongoing viability because of the operational inefficiencies in refueling and redeployment of shared vehicles," said Horace Luke, founder, and CEO of Gogoro. "GoShare is the first end-to-end mobility sharing platform, and tightly integrates the Gogoro Network, Gogoro Smartscooter, and GoShare App into a powerful solution that eliminates many of the operational challenges to deliver an optimized platform that is easy for riders to use, more sustainable to operate and more viable for cities to meet their aggressive smart city goals and initiatives."