For most of the 20th Century, the city of Moncton was the transportation hub of Atlantic Canada, a region made up of the four provinces bordering the Atlantic Ocean. The Canadian National (CN) railroad had its repair shops in the city, and a cluster of transport-dependent employers, such as the Catalog Center for the nationwide Eaton's department store chain, formed to take advantage of fast, convenient access to the national rail network. CN employed 5% of the workforce and its purchasing generated thousands more jobs.

In the 1980s, however, Moncton experienced the perfect economic storm. CN announced in 1985 that it was closing down the Moncton Shops facilities in a drive to boost productivity. The Eaton's Catalog Center also closed as the department store business model fell under attack, and several local factories fell prey to the period's rapid de-industrialization. A once-proud transportation cluster found itself facing not only economic upheaval in the short term but serious worries for the future. Because rail and transportation had dominated its economy for so long, Moncton's workforce was educated for an era of manual work, not the emerging knowledge economy. The city's downtown had a high vacancy rate and, due to lack of investment, the community's physical infrastructure was in decay.

Moncton’s historic motto is "Resurgo," Latin for "I rise again." As the Eighties came to a close, it was an open question whether Moncton would ever be able to rise again.

Collaborative Leadership

ICF has identified strong collaborative leadership as a critical factor in the success of Intelligent Communities. The Moncton story explains why it is so important.

Moncton responded to the crisis by organizing a series of regional economic development planning exercises beginning in 1989. The first planning process, Symposium 2000, brought together local government and business leaders not only from Moncton but from the neighboring city of Dieppe and town of Riverview, as well as provincial and federal agencies. But it was not just a talking shop. The government and business leaders came prepared to make deals, and they reached agreement on a series of big steps. They formed and agreed to fund the Greater Moncton Economic Commission, the first regional economic development agency, and subsequently approved its first strategic plan. They forged a partnership between local and provincial government to focus on attracting new business to the region and made individual commitments to infrastructure investment. Most important, they formalized collaboration among Moncton, Dieppe and Riverview on sharing the management of municipal services such as water and policing, and on joint development of projects like the Greater Moncton International Airport. This collaboration reduced the costs of government in the region while focusing everyone on pursuing new economic opportunities.

Call Center King

In the late Eighties, the hot opportunity turned out to be the call center. Both outbound and inbound call centers experienced a boom in this period, and Moncton had the potential to benefit because of its low costs and one special attribute: it has one of the highest rates of bilingual workforce in Canada, with half of the population speaking French and English. Both leadership and collaboration played a role in what happened next. The incumbent carrier NBTel (now Aliant Telecom), proved willing to step up to meet new requirements. The first Canadian carrier to build a 100% digital network in the early 1990s, Aliant created a suite of services to support call centers, including the leasing (rather than purchase) of costly switches and systems for home-based employees. The provincial government joined forces with Moncton to actively promote the city as a place to base telecom-intensive service and IT operations. The province helped the city to attract call centers for over two dozen national and international firms including ExxonMobil, UPS, FedEx and the Royal Bank of Canada. By 1994, call centers had become a major source of new jobs, exceeding goals set in 1991. But the 1994 plan recognized that success in call center development was not enough; the next step was to focus on "knowledge businesses" – natural and applied sciences, business and finance, computer programming and information systems.

More partnerships ensued. Moncton tapped the resources of national and provincial government agencies, including the Atlantic Innovation Fund and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, to spur attraction and start-up of knowledge-based businesses. A New Brunswick R&D Tax Credit helped companies justify location of scientific research facilities in the Greater Moncton area. The Greater Moncton Strategic Partnership linked local government with universities, colleges, local media and leading-edge companies to fund talent-attraction marketing in order to feed the rising demand for qualified people.

With the call center business continuing to attract companies including Fairmont Hotels, Rogers Communications and Lottomattica, Moncton increasingly saw homegrown ICT businesses prosper, from the Atlantic Lottery Corporation and Red Ball Internet to Vimsoft and PropertyGuys.com. By 2006, almost 45 out of every 1,000 workers in the Moncton Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) worked in customer service, information or related clerk positions, compared with an average of 12 for Canada. Moncton had witnessed a 300% increase in employment in ICT companies, a 153% increase in employment for graphic designers and illustrators, and a 43% increase in jobs for writers and translators. While New Brunswick suffered a net loss of 3,900 people from 2001 to 2006, the Greater Moncton area gained 6,800.

In 2008, the call center sector paid more than C$290 million in payroll and generated a total of C$765 million in regional economic activity. But newer businesses were also making an impact. The community's hospitals have become catalysts for an emerging life sciences cluster focusing on medical informatics, bio-markers and bio-statistics. The Atlantic Cancer Research Institute is the largest in Atlantic Canada. L'Université de Moncton is well known for research on cellular lipid metabolism and is home to New Brunswick's only medical school, while private company DDx Health Strategies is pioneering in remote support for the pharmaceutical industry and MedSenses offers health care e-learning solutions. A local entrepreneur went from working as a video game repair technician to creating a state of the art video lottery machine system. Global lottery giant GTECH acquired this Moncton grown company in 2004 and was itself acquired in 2006 by Italy's Lottomatica, which chose to maintain production of the systems in Moncton. The result has been a gaming cluster, which now includes a unit of Oracle and a significant number of homegrown companies and development centers for multinationals.

Moncton ploughed economic growth back into infrastructure, building a new City Hall, widening bridges and roads and opening up parcels of land to development of corporate headquarters, call centers and media studios. One of the most satisfying milestones was the opening of the Emmerson Business & Technology Park on the brownfield site that had been home to CN's Moncton Shops. The developer, Canada Lands Company, put C$50 million into cleanup and redevelopment of the 249-acre site, which also includes the CN Sportplex and residential units.

Connecting to the Internet Age

Greater Moncton's latest plan, Vision 2010, calls for updating the region's economic development for the Internet age. In 2007, Moncton partnered with Cisco and Hewlett-Packard to install the first free outdoor wireless mesh network in Canada. In a mesh network, data traffic is handed off between wireless nodes, most of which operate without a landline connection. This reduces the cost of cabling but requires high-quality design and a large number of nodes to succeed. City workers installed the entire system, mostly on lampposts and traffic signals, in three days across six city blocks. The network has since been expanded selectively to local parks, shopping districts and the Magnetic Hill concert site, where it supports e-commerce for local merchants as well as communication and Web browsing. The City has even created a Community Access mobile WiFi service that allows it to deploy coverage for special events on demand.

But mobility is not just for sporting events and concerts. Moncton's municipal buses also offer free WiFi. By making it convenient for bus riders to access broadband, the new service has increased usage of public transit, with positive impacts on both emissions and congestion. In response to demand, the bus fleet is scheduled to grow from 27 to 52 buses by the end of 2010.

Moncton is also deploying ICT to improve municipal services. A van equipped with high-speed data collection technology evaluates the condition of pavement on city streets and feeds information into the city's Asset Management System. The city has also installed 20,000 wireless meter-reading devices in its water system. They measure water flows so precisely that they can detect leaks within the household, which saves citizens money while promoting conservation. Building inspectors and other outside workers are taking laptops on the road and connecting securely into city systems to access information and file reports.

One constant amid these waves of changes has been the process by which Moncton built and continues to build its broadband future. Community leaders in government, academia, institutions and businesses continue to connect and collaborate to a remarkable degree. From 2004 to 2008, the chair of the City Council's Prosperity and Economic Affairs Committee was the founder and chair of the public-private Moncton Technology Planning Group (MTPG). Members of MTPG have been board members of Enterprise Greater Moncton. The Mayor of Moncton and senior staff also sit on the Board of Enterprise Greater Moncton, and are involved in MTPG as well as the city's Prosperity and Economic Affairs Committee, of which the past chairman of the Chamber of Commerce is a member. Representatives from provincial and national government agencies also have representatives in most of the groups. In some places, having such a tightly knit leadership group becomes a barrier to progress by reducing transparency and stifling new ideas. But in Moncton, it seems to have been key to the successful fight back from the economic brink and the continuing effort to build a strong, diverse and prosperous community.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Moncton.

Want to know more about Moncton?
Moncton was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum book Brain Gain.

Population: 125,000

Labor Force: 75,600

Website: www.moncton.ca

Smart21 2009 | 2010

Top7 2009

Kingston is one of Canada’s oldest cities, founded at a strategic intersection of lakes and rivers, with an historic waterfront and an employer base of Federal and Provincial agencies that attracts more government grants per capita than any other city in the nation. It has been ranked Canada’s third best place to live and smartest city, thanks to deployment of an open-access community broadband network supplemented with investment in the Eastern Ontario Regional Network bringing 10 Mbps service to rural neighborhoods. More than 90% of Kingstonians now subscribe to broadband. But the economy’s heavy dependence on public sector spending makes Kingston vulnerable to decisions made far away, and local government has developed a multi-faceted strategy to diversify its economy while maintaining the culture and quality of life that residents treasure.

Building Innovation

It is aided in this undertaking by the presence of Queen’s University, a top 10 research institution and St. Lawrence College, a 2-year institution with schools of business, computer and engineering technology, health sciences and skilled trades. Queen’s University founded an office in 1987, called PARTEQ Innovations, to identify intellectual property and support its commercialization. PARTEQ went on to build Innovation Park, where academic, business and government researchers work to pioneer new technologies and bring them to market.

Innovation has a particular focus in Kingston. The public, business, education and government have rallied around a goal to make environmental sustainability its focus. Local government launched a community planning process that resulted in Sustainable Kingston, a plan that gave rise to a nonprofit of the same name. As a result, most research and commercialization focuses on greentech and cleantech, from the Federal GreenCentre Canada research lab to a Fuel Cell Research Centre and High-Performance Virtual Computing Lab. Successful businesses are also pioneering in automation, life sciences and health technologies. In addition to sustainability, the city launched a Kingston Culture Plan in 2010 to increase the impact of the city’s already sizeable arts and culture economy, both for its own economic value and its attractiveness to creative professionals. City leaders see these efforts as steps in social transformation, helping a community that is already satisfied with its lot in life to seize the vast potential of the broadband economy.

Population: 123,363

Labor Force: 90,000

Website: www.cityofkingston.ca

Kingston Tourism: hwww.visitkingston.ca

Smart21 2009 | 2014 | 2025

Top7 2014 | 2025

The Golden Horseshoe is the region that bends around the westernmost end of Lake Ontario in Canada. At the center of the horseshoe’s curve is Hamilton, a city of 520,000 known for industry, education and cultural diversity, having the third-largest foreign-born population in the country. Located 70 kilometers southwest of Toronto (the 2014 Intelligent Community of the Year), Hamilton was once known as the Steel Capital of Canada, producing 60% of the nation’s steel. It is also a successful lake port city and operates an airport that saw passenger traffic grow tenfold from 1996 to 2002. A 30-year economic development plan begun in 2003 set the goal of creating a massive aerotropolis industrial park around that airport to capitalize on its success.

From Steel to Fiber

Being an industrial city in the broadband economy, however, has its challenges. Its biggest steel producer nearly went bankrupt before returning to profitability in 2004. It subsequently sold out to US Steel, which sold to ArcelorMital of India.  That company made major investments in the facility, making it one of the company’s most efficient and productive plants – but one that employs a much smaller number of more highly-skilled employees. 

Hamilton’s economic development effort now focuses on playing to its 21st Century strengths. In 2014, it established HCE Telecom as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the city. The City Council was driven to make this decision by Hamilton’s major employers, who complained about unplanned outages, poor customer support and lack of responsiveness from incumbents. 

Since its start in 2015, HCE has deployed a 10-gigabit fiber network to serve city facilities, business, universities and hospitals and make the city more attractive to leading-edge employers. More than 160 Hamilton locations currently receive service, and HCE has extended connectivity to more than 600 locations across Canada.  

In March of 2017, HCE acquired Sunrise Interactive Net6, which is an organization that specializes in on-shore, near-shore, and offshore Internet solutions. HCE plans to use Sunrise’s expertise to deliver new hosting, disaster recovery, call center and data center options for the area.

Forging New Companies

City leaders have come to recognize that, in the past, the city wasted too much of potential of its universities, colleges and public schools.  These institutions have formed a collaborative initiative called Education City to brand Hamilton as a destination for academic success, to which each partner contributes programs.  The public school system has made it requirement for graduation from secondary school for students to devote 40 hours to community-building work with local nonprofits.  McMaster Innovation Park (MIP) is a 55-acre innovation and research park where technology startups are collocated with the research capabilities of McMaster University and Mohawk College. MIP is home to Innovation Factory, a regional innovation centre set up to help companies find and access resources to start technology businesses; and the Forge, an incubator-accelerator by McMaster University to help drive entrepreneurship within their students and faculty that provides training, access to prototyping and production facilities.

The city has also established a life sciences cluster called Synapse Life Sciences Consortium comprised of local hospitals, academic institutions, and private sector firms to leverage its strong hospital network and bring health research to commercialization.  Using funding from public and private sources, it has also established a Centre for Integrated Transportation and Mobility to offer business and technical advisory services to Ontario-based startups and small-to-midize companies working to commercialize connected and autonomous vehicles. 

Mohawk College has partnered with the city, the District School Board, the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic School Board and other industry partners to start two programs to expand educational opportunity.  College in Motion places staff in various Hamilton high schools, libraries and community centers to offer information and encouragement to students consider post-secondary education.  Staffers provide one-on-one counselling and advice, including identifying students’ areas of interest and connecting them with college faculty members for further support. The City School program provides free, for-credit courses and workshops to students in poor neighborhoods, including specialized learning programs, workshops and other services. It targets school-age and older people who lack educational credentials and offers skills training in subjects from digital photography and advanced manufacturing to child development and welding.  Courses are developed in close collaboration with neighborhood champions who help shape the local offerings and help residents gain access to them. The program launched a mobile classroom with over 1,000 square feet of learning space including carpentry and welding stations in the fall of 2017 to bring education to disadvantaged neighborhoods.  Delivered by Mohawk College staff, the courses are designed to break down fears of the educational system, provide a base level of skills – but also to create an “on-ramp” to programs at Mohawk, where students can earn an associate’s degree and substantially increase their earning potential.  The success of the program has led Hamilton’s Community Access & Engagement team to present it at conferences across Canada. 

Creating New Land

With a lack of new land for development, Hamilton has focused on remediation of industrial brownfield sites. Through an innovative program called ERASE, it offers financial incentives to companies to clean up and repurpose polluted sites. The city has approved hundreds of development grant applications worth more than C$20 million. Redevelopment underway has generated C$3 million in construction and created 650 jobs.

The city has also focused its efforts on cleaning and revitalizing the Hamilton Harbour with the help of the provincial and federal governments via the Hamilton Harbour Remedial Action Plan. Beginning in 1989, the city has built nine combined sewer overflow (CSO) tanks to capture untreated sanitary and storm sewage during storms to keep it from being returned to the water supply until treated. Hamilton has dramatically revitalized the shoreline through the Pier 4 Park and Bayfront Park developments in the West Harbour, transforming what was once an industrial landfill site into a beautiful recreational public space. The city is also currently working on wastewater treatment plant upgrades and a variety of other projects to fully restore and enhance the Harbour’s ecosystem, including commissioning a LEED-certified environmental laboratory at the Woodward Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Engagement in Change

Hamilton created a master plan called Vision 2020 in the 1990s to guide development over the next 25 years. In 2015, it began a refresh of the plan that is a model for community engagement in planning.  It brought a booth to local festivals and community centers to have conversations with residents about their vision of the future.  Engagement methods included online surveys, meetings with key stakeholders, advertising and public meetings, but also bus tours to orient newcomers to the city and encourage residents to see their community in a new way.  Through these means, Hamilton engaged with over 50,000 residents and from that input created the “Our Future Hamilton” vision setting priorities for a new 10-year strategic plan. Among the many goals is the establishment of a Digital Office for the city focusing on improving quality of life and the digital transformation of government. 

Digital Equality

The decline of industrial employment has stranded workers who do not possess the skills and access to technology to compete in the broadband economy. A Hamilton charity operates a successful digital equality program called GreenBYTE that collects end-of-life computer systems, refurbishes them, and provides them to low-income households at no cost. It also provides computer certification training to low-income individuals. Since 2001, GreenBYTE has donated more than 12,000 computers to households, helped 100 graduates receive computer certifications and upgraded an after-school computer lab for the city.

In addition to providing computer access to households in need, Hamilton has focused on introducing local youth to digital learning at an early age. The Hamilton Code Clubs (HCC) is an initiative of the Industry Education Council (IEC) and Software Hamilton. Now in its third year of operation, HCC has had over 1,800 student participants aged 9 to 14 years old. The program teaches students core programing fundamentals during lunch breaks or after school, as well as bringing youth from across the city together to create video and data management games and websites and to program SPRK Sphero robots. HCC now includes weekend programs at the Hamilton Public Library and summer and robotics camps.

Geography, trade, industry and hard work built Hamilton’s successful economic past. Its future will leverage those same assets to create an economy that can prosper in the digital era.

Population: 787,000

Website: http://investinhamilton.ca

Smart21 2016 | 2018 | 2020

Top7 2018 | 2020

At a time when governments around the world are becoming deeply involved in managing their economies, Fredericton owes its place as an Intelligent Community to decisions to reduce the role of government in the local economy.

In colonial days, Fredericton served as the anchor of a vibrant regional economy based on trade with America's New England states. But over time, economic power gradually concentrated in the nation's geographic center, leaving the eastern provinces to become "branch office economies" dependent on decisions made elsewhere. It became so common for people to move west in search of economic opportunity that Frederictonians called it "goin' down the road."

Fredericton is the capital of the province of New Brunswick and public-sector employment shielded the community for many years from economic decline. Then in the mid-1980s, the Canadian Federal government began running large deficits and responded by offloading public costs onto provincial and municipal governments. By the 1990s, Fredericton found itself with a government that was too large, a private sector too anemic to support it, and a doubtful future.

Building a Knowledge Economy

Local government responded in 1992 with an economic development strategy called Vision 2000. It called on Fredericton to build an economy based on its unique human and economic assets, and to stop looking to others to save the day. The study itself was probably less important than the people who participated in developing it. They included city officials, university leaders, the Chamber of Commerce, real estate developers, the region's telecom firms, the hydro-electric utility and a representative of a small group of software investors.

The universities had long played a major role in Fredericton's economy and culture. The University of New Brunswick (UNB) is Canada's oldest English-language university and the first to create a computer science faculty and offer forest engineering programs. Saint Thomas University is Canada's only university focusing exclusively on teaching the liberal arts. The Maritime College of Forestry Technology is a business-government co-op that supports excellence in the management of one of Canada's most important natural resources. Through Vision 2000, the university sector began to engage in serious ways with both local government and the private sector. In 1994, UNB partnered with the city to develop the Knowledge Park, offering office space for knowledge-based businesses. The project plan emphasized quality of life with, in addition to office space, wooded areas, walking trails, and both daycare and pre-school facilities onsite. By 2007, the Park held three completed buildings totaling 90,000 square feet (8,360 m²) with a fourth 90,000 sf building under construction, and tenants included tech companies such as CGI, SkillSoft and Q1 Labs as well as the Wyndham hotel chain and the owner of the University of Phoenix, the Apollo Group. Since then, the Park has attracted more than $80M in infrastructure investment and is a primary career location for hundreds of UNB graduates. And Fredericton's innovation district as a whole hosts more than 60 R&D organizations.

To continue this trend, in 2014, Ignite Fredericton, Planet Hatch and UNB established an MOU for experiential learning. The program aims to provide students with as much practical and real-world experience as possible during their studies. Since creating the MOU, UNB has been acknowledged as Canada's most entrepreneurial university. In 2021, UNB faculty and Ignite Fredericton collaborated under the MOU to create a new MBA course in Applied Integrative Studies. The course pairs MBA students with local businesses that are suffering from a variety of challenges, including financial, marketing, HR and more. The students work throughout the course to create solutions to their paired businesses' troubles, gaining a first-hand look at the business world as part of their coursework and providing a valuable service to their partners in the process.

It was the small group of software investors, however, who probably had the biggest impact. They saw Vision 2000 as an opportunity and used the government's clear show of support to form the first informal executive network in the community. Their timing was good. As provincial and local government froze hiring and began to downsize, the best and brightest civil servants left to start "knowledge sector" businesses in technology and services. They found support both from private investors and programs introduced by the provincial and Federal governments, including the Atlantic Innovation Fund, the BREAKTHRU Business Plan Competition and the Industrial Research Assistance Program. This transformation continued over the next decades all the way to the 2020s, in which 75% of Fredericton's newly created jobs were in technology.

The Vision 2000 plan was updated in 2001 and then every three years after that. It began to target development in specific sectors such as e-learning, aerospace training, health, network security and multimedia games. The 2004 plan included a bold statement of purpose: that economic development should focus first and foremost on supporting locally owned firms and give second place to business attraction. That commitment was no doubt made easier by a track record of success. In 2005, the knowledge sector employed more people than did the provincial government for the first time in history.

The Broadband Barrier

As demand for Internet connectivity rose across Canada, Fredericton found itself a "have not" community. Carriers focused investment in the same geographic center that had so long dominated the Canadian economy and showed no interest in upgrading dial-up service in the "outer provinces." After lobbying proved unsuccessful, Fredericton decided to form its own telecommunications company. e-Novations was established as a co-op. It obtained funding commitments from 12 founding members – including the city, the universities, business users and the region's largest Internet Service Provider – and used it to build a fiber ring connecting to their facilities. It then pooled their demand and purchased broadband capacity in bulk. Each member paid for a minimum guaranteed bandwidth, but had the ability to tap any unused bandwidth in the system on demand. Because networks tend to have substantial idle capacity, e-Novations immediately reduced the members' cost and established a new competitive price point in the region. By mid-2002, e-Novations had a stable fiber ring and positive cash flow but struggled with how to meet demand from new prospective members outside the downtown core. The answer proved to be point-to-point microwave links to such facilities as the local airport, which could be set up quickly and at lower cost than fiber to the premises. When commercial carriers became members of e-Novations in order to resell broadband to their small business and residential customers, it was clear that the community network model was a success.

In 2003, Fredericton took the next step. Using its fiber ring as a backbone, the city deployed almost 300 WiFi access points throughout downtown and the business corridor, in public facilities and retail malls. Rejecting the idea of hot-spots, Fredericton sought to blanket the area with overlapping coverage zones. It branded the result the GoFred Zone: an area covering 100% of the city in which access to broadband wireless is absolutely free. The city maintains this level of WiFi access to this day, with major hotspots in the Fredericton mall, Kings Place, parks and arenas, hotels and convention centers and the airport. As Fredericton's Mayor Brad Woodside puts it, "We don't charge you to walk on our sidewalks. Why would we charge you for broadband?"

Fredericton's Partnership in Innovation with F6 Networks (now Explorenet) has also led to a network spanning over 1,500 km across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The city continued seeking new partnerships and established one with the Maine Fiber Company to create the first open-access dark fiber border crossing in Atlantic Canada. This network provides the lowest latency terrestrial route between Halifax, Nova Scotia and Boston, Massachusetts. Dark fiber allows customers in the city to light and manage their own dedicated fiber strands with electronics they supply. With GoFred Dark Fibre, customers can access city-wide ultra secure, ultra fast and 100% dedicated fiber optics offered on an annual rental basis or on a long term IRU (irrevocable right of use) lease. In 2020, the city partnered with Rogers Communications to make Rogers' 5G network available in Fredericton. Rogers also partnered with Ignite Fredericton to provide 5G to its the Innovation Lab at the Cyber Centre in the Knowledge Park, which will be run by CyberNB. 

Fredericton's rich broadband offerings have created a growing culture of use for broadband and IT in daily life. The city Web site offers an online database of city services, and allows residents to register for recreation and meeting space online. Parents view school announcements and homework assignments over the Internet and can participate remotely in meetings of the school board. They access the FredKid.com online portal, created entirely by Fredericton families, to learn about programs and services available to support them. The Harvest Jazz and Blues festival, one of the largest music events in eastern Canada, attracts over 80,000 fans to Fredericton each year. It takes more than 800 volunteers to produce it, and they rely on a Web-based volunteer management system to make it happen. Fredericton is also home to the National Adult Literacy Database, a nonprofit that provides Internet-based literacy and core skills training to five million users a year.

Imagine Fredericton

Fredericton continues to grow and is predicted to increase its population by 30% over the next 25 years. To ensure the growth process goes well for everyone, the city launched the Imagine Fredericton initiative in 2016. Imagine Fredericton was a multifaceted initiative that directly engaged the community to determine how to manage residential and employment growth in the coming years and what areas are of particular value to the public. The initiative included many different engagement opportunities from open houses and a variety of online tools to a three-day City Summit, one-on-one conversations and an “Imagination Station.” These activities aimed to provide citizens with an understanding of how Fredericton has grown to date, its existing assets, and the key challenges and opportunities it faces.
Imagine Fredericton resulted in a list of nine community goals for the city:

• Sustainable and Efficient
• Green and Healthy
• Welcoming and Supportive
• Strong and Diverse Economy
• Culturally Rich and Diverse
• Vibrant Downtown and Riverfront
• Complete Neighborhoods and Distinctive Places
• Complete Transportation System
• Safe and Inviting Public Realm

These goals will provide a roadmap for the city’s upcoming Growth Strategy and the new Municipal Plan in coming years. Since establishing them, the city has already designed three distinct growth scenarios for public discussion and analysis. These scenarios were presented for community feedback, which showed a clear preference for growing the city in a more compact, efficient way than before, balancing growth on the north and south sides of the Saint John River and maximizing growth in the Urban Core, where an estimated 8,000 more residents can be housed. With this feedback, Fredericton can focus on providing the best path forward for its citizens based on their preferences and future needs. As of 2019, the city added a 5-year immigration strategy to the plan in partnership with the MultiCultural Association of Fredericton and was awarded silver status by IEDC for its population growth strategy.

Connecting the Community Through Digital Projects

Beginning in 2018, Fredericton has implemented several core projects to engage with the local community and enhance quality of life. Digital Fredericton is the city’s 5-year strategic transformation plan to become more flexible, efficient, transparent and responsive government. The plan includes moving core government systems to the cloud for easier, more efficient access and usage and establishing more e-Government services and research programs to identify community needs and improve the overall experience. Digital Fredericton also includes establishment of an Open Data Portal to allow citizens to access up-to-date information and local entrepreneurs to develop e-service applications for citizens.

To collect data for public use in the Open Data Portal, the city has partnered with eleven-x to deploy Internet of Things (IoT) sensors throughout Fredericton. These sensors monitor occupancy and utilization of wheelchair accessible parking throughout the city, air and noise pollution levels in multiple areas and water consumption, and all of this data is made available to the public through the Open Data Portal. Sensors are also in place to monitor the water level of the Saint John River to help respond to flood conditions in as timely a manner as possible. Other current and planned uses of the IoT sensors parking spot occupancy status using real-time connected sensors for easier parking, quality-of-life applications for air and noise pollution, water consumption sensors in three major areas and field moisture sensors to monitor the condition of sports fields.

Fredericton also developed Fred E-Hack, a boutique-style 12-hour hackathon designed to gather ideas on potential use cases and viable products to make use of the IoT sensors. This hackathon will open up the network to entrepreneurs and innovators looking to develop new applications and business opportunities by providing access to the Fredericton Open Data Portal & API (application program interface), tech and
connectivity expertise from eleven-x and the City,  ST Microelectronics Development Kits for Proof of Concept using sensor technology, one-month free access to qwiklabs.com learning platform compliments of GDG (Google Developer Group) and Cloud Fredericton.

A Remarkable Transformation

The combination of smart strategy, hard-working private entrepreneurship and cooperative public investment in information and communications technology have completely transformed the economy of Fredericton over the past fifteen years. More than 70% of New Brunswick's knowledge industries call Fredericton home and, on a per capita basis, the city hosts the largest engineering cluster in North America. The population of Fredericton grew 14.5% since 1992 but the labor force grew 22% over the same period and average household income has jumped 13.5% since 2003. The community has added 12,200 new jobs in the past decade, and seen two of its companies win the nation's top innovation award.

And being a political capital still doesn't hurt. Fredericton's aerospace training cluster serves Canada's largest military training base, located near Fredericton. After a nationwide search, Canada's National Research Council Institute for Information Technology established the first headquarters facility outside Ottawa in Fredericton, where its e-business facility offers local companies access to cutting-edge skills from more than 50 researchers and technicians. Sixteen companies in its incubator have attracted more than C$25 million in venture capital. What distinguishes Fredericton is its success in streamlining government and stimulating a robust private sector without sacrificing the advantages that come with its political position.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Fredericton.

Population: 64,812

Labor Force: 31,505

Website: www.fredericton.ca

Smart21 2006 | 2008 | 2009 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

Top7 2008 | 2009 | 2022 | 2024

Calgary is a western city of 900,000 people that is one of the fastest-growing communities in Canada. Best known as a center of the Canadian oil industry and for its annual “Stampede” celebration of its cowboy heritage, Calgary also has a significant telecommunications and wireless manufacturing base, and over 1,300 software companies with expertise in geomatics and image processing. It has more miles of optical fiber than any city in Canada, according to the Yankee Group, and broadband Internet is accessible to 99% of residences. In the ten years between 1988 to 1998, technology employment tripled to over 9% of the labor force, and technology employers include IBM, EDS, AT&T, Vertitas, Shaw Communications, Nortel Networks and TELUS.

Calgary Technologies

Leading the charge to build a Digital Age economy for the community is the public-private corporation, Calgary Technologies. Its projects include Calgary INFOPORT, which has succeeded in building a local information and communications technology industry; the Calgary Innovation Center, which acts as a catalyst between life sciences innovators and the venture capital community; and the Alastair Ross Technology Center incubator. In 2001, Calgary Technologies launched the ConnectCalgary project, using matching funds from the Canadian Government’s Smart Community award program. ConnectCalgary is creating online services and Web portals, public access computer terminals, and a team of trained facilitators to work with government agencies and individuals at risk. ConnectCalgary aims to provide the at-risk population of Calgary with access to the social, health and educational services they need to become more independent and productive members of the community. With this latest program, Calgary has demonstrated leadership in closing the Digital Divide in western Canada.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Calgary.

Population: 900,000

Website: www.calgary.ca

Intelligent Community of the Year 2002 (co-honoree)

Top7 2002

ICF selected the city of Sunderland as a Top Seven Intelligent Community for four years in a row. The largest city in the Northeast of England, Sunderland quite literally rose from the ashes of the Industrial Age to create a globally competitive city prospering in the Broadband Economy. This transformation was due to neither luck nor location, but to visionary leadership, good planning and unrelenting commitment.

In the 1980s, this former shipbuilding and mining center on the North Sea, which at one time launched more ships than any other port in Europe, had a peak unemployment rate of 22%. As the last shipyard closed in 1988 and the last coal mine followed in 1994, Sunderland fell into the bottom 10% of Britain's "depressed districts." The legacy of heavy industry was a large unemployed group of low-skilled workers, many with chronic health problems. With so little local opportunity, young people fled the city, leaving behind a shrinking and aging population.

Partnership Strategy

Sunderland's government responded in a way that would become a much-copied strategy for success. In 1991, it organized a volunteer group called the Sunderland Partnership, comprised of members from government, local universities, the chamber of commerce and citizen leaders representing important constituencies. The Partnership developed a vision for a new economy based on what Europeans called "telematics" - the union of telecommunications and computers. While City Council staff labored to translate this vision into measurable goals and meaningful programs, the Partnership focused on politics. Members educated their organizations and constituents about the crisis into which Sunderland had fallen, the challenges to recovery, and their vision for the future. This was to prove essential to Sunderland's success, because it created the political will and integration needed to embrace change.

The Telematics Strategy was published in 1996 to cover a 5-year period through 2001. It included training programs in call center and other Digital Age skills for the unemployed, public-access Internet kiosks and "electronic village halls" with Internet access, business incubation programs and an initial, government-funded high-speed network for a metropolitan area possessing no more than basic telephone infrastructure.

Doxford International

Meanwhile, the economic development staff succeeded in persuading a real estate developer to build the first speculative building of what is now Doxford International, an award-winning office park. During the 1990s, it filled and expanded, filled again and expanded again as the European headquarters of Nike and Verisign, and home to such companies as Barclays, CitiFinancial, EDF Energy and T-Mobile. These companies were attracted by the high-quality facilities in a city with attractive wage costs, a strong incentive program, and the availability of freshly-trained labor. The same team won public-sector funding from the national government and European Commission and invested it in rebuilding the derelict waterfront into a new home for the University of Sunderland, a former technical institute that had gained university status in 1992.

By 2000, Sunderland had created 9,000 new jobs. A second Telematics strategy, covering the 1999-2003 period, focused on using ICT to promote social inclusion and ensure that everyone benefited from the city's transformation into an Intelligent Community. It set new goals, including development of a publicly-owned ISP and e-government hub called the Sunderland Host, expansion of the high-speed network to businesses and community centers, and creation of a one-stop Sunderland Portal for citizens, business and government users. There was no let-up, however, in economic development efforts. In 2002, EDS opened its first data center in the North of England in Sunderland. During the three years from 2002 to 2004, Sunderland secured 72% of the new jobs entering the region, despite having just 11% of the North's population.

The latest plan, called The Sunderland Strategy (2004-07) has focused on exploiting the city's global connectivity and growing knowledge workforce to attract even more inward investment and encourage the formation and growth of small and midsize companies. For the past five years, the number of net new jobs has increased 4.87% compared with the UK average of 3.17%. Sunderland has also seen a measurable improvement in the quality of those jobs, with growth primarily in financial and customer services that offer good pay and prospects for advancement. From 2004 to 2005, gross weekly pay in Sunderland rose at three times the national average, and the average salary for full-time employees is almost double the national minimum wage.

Working Together

Sunderland's transformation from industrial has-been to Intelligent Community illustrates the power of making many separate elements work in concert. For example, the city's activism about deploying broadband, and willingness to create joint ventures where necessary to reduce risks to the private sector, convinced carriers including NTL-Telewest, BT and Tiscali to provide broadband at competitive costs for speeds up to 10 Mbps. Broadband penetration has leaped from 25% two years ago to 75% today. The City Council has taken advantage of this connectivity to create an e-government portal that delivers a wide range of services to about 30,000 visitors per month. Broadband is also the medium for a Virtual Learning Environment created by the City of Sunderland College that is used by more than 20,000 students for training in information technology.

The "electronic village halls" created by the first Telematics Strategy are being expanded into multi-agency centers, which provide healthcare, housing, welfare rights, police, job-finder and other services as well youth and sports facilities. Video-conferencing links people using the centers to support staff. These are supplemented by kiosks distributed throughout the city. Sunderland has also identified and trained Community e-Champions to broaden digital inclusion at the neighborhood level, as part of a "peoplefirst" strategy that also equips social service workers with wireless PDAs from which they can instantly check databases and record service requests.

Following on the success of Doxford International, Sunderland has attracted major investment in technology office parks and incubators. The Business & Innovation Center at the Sunderland Science Park offers 200,00 sq. ft. (18,580 m2)of high-tech workspace housing 165 companies employing 1,100 people. The Rainton Bridge Business Park currently houses 150,000 sq. ft. (13,935 m2) of incubators and technology facilities and will become the site of a 400,000 sq. ft. development by Northern Rock that will put the site on course to exceed the original target of 4,000 new jobs.

The University of Sunderland, with 250 full time R&D staff, has become an innovation hub that makes business formation a priority. A Digital Media Center created with support from Sony is the most advanced facility of its kind in the UK, with 50,000 sq. ft. (4,645 m2) of film, TV and radio studios, and includes an incubation space for students setting up their own businesses. A New Ventures project facilitates the spin-out of new businesses from University research, while the University continues to expand incubator facilities and develop venture financing in collaboration with government and the private sector. A recent survey revealed that 10% of Sunderland's labor force is now self-employed - inspired perhaps by the success of local entrepreneurs like Paul Callaghan, who founded Leighton Group at the Business & Innovation Center in 1997. It is now a global business serving customers including British Airways, Lloyds TSB and Microsoft.

So successful have been its efforts to develop a knowledge-based economy that Sunderland has begun branding itself as the "Software City." It is remarkable to think that, in a single generation, the people of Sunderland have moved from slag heaps, slums and stagnation into a future built on turning knowledge into prosperity.

Population: 283,700

Labor Force: 126,100

Website: www.sunderland.gov.uk

Smart21 2007

Top7 2002 | 2004 | 2005 | 2007

Manchester is the hub of a Greater Manchester urban area of some 2.6 million people. It has a vibrant economy where, according to The Times of London, 60 international banks and 80 of the UK's top 100 companies have offices. In 2002, it hosted the 2002 Commonwealth Games, the world's second largest sporting event, and the Sportscity development created for the Games has become a valued asset.

But it is also a city of sharp contrasts. The district of East Manchester – once the hub of Britain's world-leading cotton industry – was decimated by the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s. It suffered a 60% employment loss between 1975 and 1985, when 52% of households were receiving state benefits. In 1998, two of East Manchester's electoral districts were among the top twenty on the UK government's National Index of Deprivation. As the rest of the metropolitan area has risen to the challenges of the Broadband Economy, the failure of East Manchester has become more glaring. But it has also planted the seeds of hope for regeneration.

The Eastserve Project

New East Manchester Limited is a partnership between Manchester City Council, national government agencies and the local community. It is responsible for developing and implementing a strategy to revitalize East Manchester's economy, increase employment, improve education and create more and higher-quality housing. One of its projects, Eastserve, is recognized by ICF for deploying an IT-based solution that addresses these goals while strengthening the social bonds of the community.

At first glance, Eastserve is a Web portal (www.eastserve.com), little different from government or neighborhood sites in thousands of communities. What sets it apart is the way in which it was implemented and the skills of the developers in meeting so many different goals.

Begun in 2000, the Eastserve project began by surveying residents on their needs for information and their ability to access it. Residents identified four priorities: employment and training, housing, policing and street-based services. As a result, the portal design included a virtual police station with anonymous crime reporting, a home-finder system for public housing, and online job searches and resume preparation system, among many other features.

The surveys also revealed that only 19% of residents had access to a computer. In response, Eastserve tapped a UK Government program that distributed recycled computers in deprived areas in order to launch a 2001 pilot project involving 450 households. Each household received a recycled PC or set-top box at a subsidized price, plus free dial-up Internet access for the first three months. The project also placed PCs at public access locations including police stations, housing offices and youth clubs. The pilot was successful enough to lead to a second phase that targeted 4,500 households to receive new or recycled computers, added new content to the Web portal, tied the project into IT training programs for schools funded by the e-Learning Foundation, and tackled the problems of financial exclusion.

Firing On All Cylinders

In Phase Two, Eastserve began firing on all cylinders, thanks to the down-to-earth advice offered by a Residents Panel of volunteers and volunteer Project Board. With 25% of East Manchester residents lacking any access to broadband, the project created a wireless Eastserve Broadband network that now links 1,700 households, six community centers and 14 schools and is being extended to adjoining neighborhoods. Its work with residents convinced Eastserve that they rapidly outgrew the capabilities of recycled PCs and set-top TV systems. In response, it began offering new fully-configured PCs at a higher price (£200) compared with £50 for a recycled system. Uptake was so strong that the cost of the subsidies made it necessary to scale the pilot back to 3,500 households. All residents who purchased the subsidized systems were required to attend a three-hour training course at local community centers, online centers or the local college. Eastserve also took the opportunity created by the sale of systems to involve the East Manchester Credit Union in handling all cash for the program and offering low-interest loans to residents. The loans made it possible for many more people to participate and also connected many of them for the first time to a financial institution other than loan sharks or check-cashing services.

This small-scale success is likely to set a pattern for greater progress in the future. According to Eastserve's leadership, the project has helped Manchester's City Council to understand both the potential of technology-based economic development and the need to invest in creating demand for e-government programs. With strong support from governmental leaders, the future of East Manchester looks brighter than it has in years.

Population: 430,000

Website: www.manchester.gov.uk

Smart21 2006 | 2009

Top7 2006

Glasgow, Scotland was a leader in Britain’s Industrial Revolution and, before the World Wars, one of the richest cities in Europe. But in the post-war years, the city suffered the intense decline common to many former industrial centers, as industries from shipbuilding and mining to heavy manufacturing lost their competitiveness. In the 1980s, this city of over 600,000 people began a transformation of its economy to stress services, culture and tourism, backed by large-scale government investment in redevelopment.

Environment for E-Commerce

Steady progress was made, yet by 1996, Glasgow still suffered a 16.8% unemployment rate. Then in 1998, the British Government published a Competitiveness White Paper that set out a commitment to make the UK “the best environment in the world for e-commerce.” Based on this framework, Scottish Enterprise, a regional agency, engaged a wide range of stakeholders in this transformation and, through consultation, set specific goals for Scottish progress in becoming an e-commerce hub. The goals included ensuring that, by 2002, at least half of Scottish small and midsize enterprises would have Internet connections and one-third would be engaged in e-commerce; and that 20% of all new business start-ups would be e-commerce companies by the spring of 2001. The Scottish Executive has since established two major programs to help meet these goals. Digital Scotland aims to ensure that Scotland obtains and retains maximum economic and social advantage from ICT, while a Knowledge Economy Task Force is charged with ensuring the development of a broad-based knowledge economy for Scotland.

60% Decrease in Unemployment

Glasgow has become a natural focal point for these national and regional policy initiatives. Telecommunications are 100% digital and highly competitive, with costs among the lowest in Europe. Glasgow will be one of the first European cities to go live with 3G wireless service, and British Telecom has chosen Glasgow as the location for its Data Hosting facility, the largest in the UK. Huge investment is being made in the city by both public and private sectors, including a £300m program to develop 2m square feet of new office space in the financial services district that will accommodate 20,000 jobs, and new high-speed broadband infrastructure. By 2000, the unemployment rate had dropped to 6.9% of the working age population, a 60% improvement that matched Scotland’s average and was only slightly above the UK average of 5.6%. Work on Glasgow’s transformation continues, focusing on accelerating business uptake of technology, promoting the growth of e-commerce support industries, and injecting e-commerce into Scottish education and training.

Population: 600,000

Website: www.glasgow.gov.uk

Intelligent Community of the Year 2004

Top7 2004

In the 1990s, the leaders of the city of Dundee looked back on two decades of economic devastation and vowed that the future would be different. In the 19th and early 20th Centuries, Dundee had been a flourishing city known throughout Britain for trading, whaling, textiles, food manufacturing and shipbuilding. Deindustrialization took hold with a vengeance, however, in the mid 1970s. Large-scale plant closures threw thousands out of work and caused an out-migration of skills and talent. Resulting union militancy did little to improve conditions but made national headlines that reinforced Dundee's reputation as a city in terminal decline. Population losses hit the retail sector hard, discouraged inward investment, and sharply eroded quality of life.

In 1991, local government created The Dundee Partnership, a joint venture among key players including city government, the economic development agency Scottish Enterprise, universities, community groups, and the business sector. Its original focus was on the traditional tools of economic development: rebuilding the city center, developing tourist and leisure facilities and attracting corporate investment. But as the 20th Century gave way to the 21st, it became clear that more was needed. For the first time in decades, the city was experiencing net job growth, despite a continuing fall in manufacturing employment and levels of unemployment that remained well above the national average. Research revealed that Dundee's university sector - including the University of Dundee, University of Abertay Dundee, the Ninewells teaching hospital and Scottish Crop Research Institute - was driving job creation, not only in established sectors like publishing and scientific research, but in such new fields as software, animation, computer games, film and television.

Focus on New Sectors

In response, the Partnership refocused its effort on stimulating business formation in the new sectors. A government-funded Business Gateway project began providing e-business training and support to small and midsize companies, helping to improve the e-readiness of nearly 600 companies in 2004 and 2005. Moving in synch, Dundee's universities established graduate business incubators and policies promoting the spin-out of new companies. The University of Abertay Dundee opened the IC CAVE research center to support the computer game and digital entertainment sector. A £20 million (US$40m) Digital Media Park entered into development and, by 2007, opened its first phase, consisting of 100,000 sq. feet (9290 m2) of space for e-businesses. Two new marketing partnerships, bringing together public, private and academic leaders, launched Web sites, e-newsletters and conferences promoting "BioDundee" to attract life science companies and "Interactive Tayside" to the digital media sector. Several Scottish investment programs support these efforts, including Proof of Concept, which funds pre-commercial research, and SMART/SPUR, which issues grants to small-to-midsize businesses to develop innovative and commercially viable products and processes.

By 2007, the life sciences sector employed 3,900 people including 300 scientists from across the world. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals announced that it would locate the world's first translational medical research center in the city. Meanwhile, over 380 digital media businesses have opened or moved into the Tayside region, compared with 150 in 2000. They employ more than 3,000 people and generate over £100 million (US$198m) in annual sales.

Discovery Card

Dundee has also taken digital technology to the people. The City Council's Web site began offering online payment and processes to the public in 2002 and by 2007 had collected £25 million (US$50m) in taxes and fees. With more than 60 online applications, the Web site is used by 32% of Dundee's population and received satisfactory rankings from 86% of users. In 2006 alone, it processed 60,000 transactions and collected over £8 million ($16m).

Behind the "public face" of the Web, Dundee developed a comprehensive approach to its digital relationship with citizens. It established a Citizen Account database system that captured data on citizens (with their permission) and used it to pre-fill online forms. Some of the data was amassed through issuance of the Dundee Discovery Card, which replaced 10 separate card-related services in the city, for everything from bus service and parking to social services. The Discovery Card was the first example in Scotland of a university (Abertay) and City Council sharing a single card for their different purposes. One of the outstanding benefits of the Discovery Card, in the eyes of the City Council, is that it eliminates the social stigma attached to social services cards for low-income residents. So popular has it become - with 44,000 cards issued, used by 87% of 12-18 year olds for school meals and bus travel, and 85% of +60 year olds for leisure access and bus travel - that the Scottish Government decided to deploy a multi-application card for the whole country and asked Dundee to run the program.

Digital Savvy and Community Service

This combination of digital savvy with community service is typical of Dundee. Broadband is commercially available to 100% of households, businesses and institutions in Dundee, with 48% of households and 90% of businesses currently connected. Speeds of up to 10 Mbps are available for £13-30 (US$25-60) per month. But the city also operates 300 PCs with free Internet access at locations including 12 learning centers for adults, generating 15,000 user sessions per month. At least one free-access terminal is located within 2 miles of every household in the city. A network of 350 networked bus stops provides real-time travel information to digital signs and kiosks onsite as well as to mobile phones. A professor at the University of Abertay has founded ADD Knowledge in partnership with government agencies to deliver Scotland's first home-study program for over 400,000 primary school children using next-generation video game consoles. Meanwhile, local health services use text messaging to remind patients about appointments and medications, and Dundee is proposing to become a test bed for Scotland's Project XYZ, which aims to create a WiMax network across major cities.

Dundee has come a long way since the dark days of the mid-1990s. From 2000 to 2004, the city had net employment growth of 3.4%. That average number encompassed the loss of 3,300 manufacturing jobs, a 20% growth in digital media, and 50-60% growth in life sciences jobs. New business starts rose 7% during the period and unemployment dropped, though it remains over a full percentage point higher than the average for Scotland. In 2007, the Partnership created a new group called the Digital Observatory. Its goal: to closely track Dundee's development as an Intelligent Community and provide leaders with the information they need to keep their community on the path to prosperity.

Population: 142,000

Labor Force: 80,000

Website: www.dundee.com

Smart21 2007 | 2008 | 2010

Top7 2007 | 2008 | 2010

The city of Stockholm stands on fourteen islands on Sweden's south-central east coast. According to legend, the city's name tells you how it was born: as a fortress made of logs ("stock") on an island (“holm”) guarding the entrance to lake Mälaren. Stockholm has been Sweden´s political, cultural and economic center since the 1200s.

Sweden has charted its own economic and political course throughout the 20th Century. Stockholm was spared the destruction of two world wars and saw its economy boom in the post-war years, when Sweden instituted very high levels of social spending that consumed almost 50% of GDP in taxes. The bursting of a real estate bubble in the early Nineties caused a severe economic crisis, in which employment fell 10% and a run on the currency forced the Central Bank to briefly raise interest rates as high as 500% in an unsuccessful effort to defend a fixed exchange rate. In 1994, with a budget deficit exceeding 15% of GDP, the national government instituted multiple reforms and slashed spending to put its financial house in order. The result was to strike a new and apparently sustainable balance between cradle-to-grave social benefits for citizens and strong economic growth based on knowledge, creativity and innovation.

One out of every eleven Swedes lives in Stockholm, and in the first decade of the new century, their city has continued to find way to make "big" work better. The economy benefits enormously from Stockholm's status as the political and cultural capital. Most of the country's head offices and one in three foreign-owned companies are located there. Nearly one in three new Swedish companies is located in the county of which Stockholm is the capital. Education levels are high (51% of Stockholmers have studied at university levels compared with 35% nationwide) and average salaries are proportionally higher. By law, Swedish cities must deal with everything from childcare to the burial of a person, though in practice, much of the work is outsourced to private companies. The City of Stockholm is one of Sweden's biggest employers, with 42,000 employees (one for every 19 citizens) and a budget of 37.4 billion kronor (3.9bn Euros or US$4.6bn). Its efficiency and effectiveness inevitably go a long way toward determining the economic competitiveness of the city.

The Stokab Model

During the early Nineties crisis, the City of Stockholm decided to pursue an unusual model in telecommunications. The city-owned company Stokab started in 1994 to build a fiber-optic network throughout the municipality as a level playing field for all operators. Stokab dug up the streets once to install conduit and run fiber, closed them up, and began offering dark fiber capacity to carriers for less than it would cost them to install it themselves. Today, the 1.2 million kilometer (720,000-mile) network has more than 90 operators and 450 enterprises as primary customers and is now in the final year of a three-year project to bring fiber to 100% of public housing, which is expected to add 95,000 households to the network. Stockholm's Mayor has set a goal of connecting 90% of all households to fiber by 2012.

As an information utility, the Stokab network has become an engine for driving efficiency in every aspect of government. The City's Web site hosts a huge range of applications through which citizens can request and receive service online, from applying for social housing for the elderly to a schools portal that facilitates collaboration among students, teachers, school administrators and parents or guardians. Over 95% of renters use the housing department's portal to find apartments, and the library portal provides online access to the content of 44 individual libraries. After pilot projects in 2005, the city has also instituted a contact center to handle inquiries and complaints from offline citizens and to support users of e-services. There is a special telephone line for the elderly to call.

Much of the efficiency gain happens inside the walls of government offices. Stockholm uses a Web-based tool to manage its operations at all levels from the Municipal Assembly to schools and housing for the elderly. The system aims to automate routine administrative tasks, such as accounts payable and applying for vacation time, and encourage collaboration across agencies. Citizens can follow City Council meetings through Internet video, Internet radio and broadcast radio, as well as having online access to the minutes and documents of each meeting. The city is investing about 650 million kronor (59m Euros or US$72.2m) in developing the various services and in using IT to reduce operating costs and improve citizen services. To prevent redundant investments, Stockholm has introduced a coordination program through which agencies apply for funding for e-service projects from a central office.

In 2007, the City of Stockholm published Vision 2030, identifying the key characteristics the city aimed to have by that year. In 2030, according to the plan, Stockholm would be a world-class metropolis offering a rich urban living experience, the center of an internationally competitive innovation region, and a place where citizens enjoyed a broad range of high-quality, cost-effective social services. All employees of the city receive online training three times per year on the goals of the program and the changing nature of their responsibilities. The city also uses Web-based tools to track progress toward its goals and publishes good examples on the city-wide intranet to inspire others.

Exporting Innovation

For over a century, Sweden has been an export economy. Timber, iron ore and hydropower remain important exports but 50% of Sweden's output now comes from its engineering sector, including telecom, automobiles and pharmaceuticals. These are the industries in which Stockholm leads. The big pharmaceutical company AstraZenica manages its global life sciences research in the Stockholm region. ABB, a global leader in automation and robotics, has R&D facilities in nearby Vasteras (a 2006 Smart21 Community). Ericsson, one of the biggest names in network equipment and related services, does most of its R&D in Stockholm's Kista Science City.

Kista got its start in the mid-Seventies as a mixed-use satellite city combining workplaces and apartments. Several companies including Ericsson and IBM placed factories or facilities there, and small to mid-size companies began locating there to gain access to them. In 1985, the City of Stockholm decided that Kista needed more active management and brought together stakeholders, companies and universities in a non-profit foundation to encourage knowledge transfer. This motivated several research institutes to start operations there, including a branch of the Royal Institute of Technology and the computer-science school of the University of Stockholm. As the ICT cluster gained momentum, Stockholm created the Kista Science City Company and the Stockholm Innovation and Growth (STING) incubator. Today, about 31,000 people work in Kista Science City, which houses 1,400 different companies of all sizes. WIRED Magazine, in a review of technology clusters around the world, ranked Kista second, beaten only by Silicon Valley.

In addition to Kista, Stockholm economic development efforts focus on its life sciences cluster, ranked third in Europe, and on its clean tech industry, consisting of 2,700 companies with annual export growth of 16%.

City government is a significant customer for clean tech, currently investing 1.7 billion kronor (160m Euros or US$207m) in energy-efficiency equipment. This has been characteristic of Stockholm since the mid-1990s. City government believes in making big investments of money, resources and time in the economy and society without neglecting the need to make sure that "big" continues to get better. On February 23, 2009 the City of Stockholm was appointed the first Green Capital of Europe by the European Commission. Stockholm was appointed for its holistic vision that combines growth with sustainable development and includes the ambitious target of becoming independent of fossil fuels by 2050.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Stockholm.

Population: 795,163

Labor Force: 442,500

Website: international.stockholm.se

Intelligent Community of the Year 2009

Smart21 2009

Top7 2009