New York, N.Y.
From Taipei, Taiwan, to Three Hills, Alta., communities are falling over each other trying to declare themselves smart, intelligent, connected or e-something.
This being conference season, smart communities and those that want to be have been getting together all over the place. And yes, they do it the old-fashioned, face-to-face way.
The premier gathering of the "Smart Cities" clan is the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), which used to be based on a high floor of the World Trade Centre in New York City.
When asked how they had the prescience to move out of that building a year before the 9/11 attacks, ICF development director Louis Zacharilla laughs and says, "they wanted to double our rent."
Zacharilla says the ICF's current home in Lower Manhattan is itself an example of "smart" real estate. The building at 55 Broad Street stood empty for five years in the 1990s, until an enterprising developer gutted it, wired it up for high tech and renamed it the New York Information Technology Centre.
The 30-storey tower features state-of-the-art communications and a giant video wall in the lobby for tenants to showcase their works. The ICF's neighbours in the building include Cap Gemini, Nokia and Sun Microsystems.
But that's New York City. How does a Canadian community make it into the big leagues of smart cities?
Well, Calgary did it in 2002, winning the ICF's Intelligent Community of the Year Award in a tie with Seoul, South Korea. This year the competition was stiff, but Waterloo, Ont., made it into the final "Smart Seven". The city that's home to both the University of Waterloo and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM,) was so confident that it sent a large delegation to New York, including Mayor Herb Epp, RIM chairman and co-CEO Jim Balsillie, and even a reporter from the local newspaper.
Alas, it was not Waterloo's year, as the top honours were snagged by Taipei. The Asian city was honoured for its CyberCity program that started as a major push toward e-government. According to Taipei's application, by May 2005, 84 per cent of the government's total document traffic was moving through its electronic document exchange.
Information technology education was made a priority, with $93 million US invested in turning students into productive knowledge workers. The Taipei government also deployed a municipal wireless network to mass transit stations and all elementary and middle school campuses, where each class was equipped with its own website to facilitate teacher-student communications.
This type of top-down government action might not fly in a North American culture, but it has certainly yielded results in Taipei. This year's competition put a particular emphasis on the sustainability of smart community projects, and Taipei ranked high in that dimension.
Canada was not completely shut out in the ICF awards this year, since the new MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto was named 2006 Intelligent Building of the Year.
This 700,000-sq.-ft. research complex blends heritage and new buildings and provides, in the words of the ICF, an environment that is "designed to build and sustain an entrepreneurial ecosystem, which includes services that assist in providing risk capital, management and business tools, as well as access to global markets, in support of young and emerging companies."
The other Canadian winner was William Hutchison, the founding chairman of CANARIE Inc., which produced the world's longest national ultra-broadband communications network (CAnet4).
Hutchison, who received a lifetime achievement award, now devotes much of his energy to the $17-billion mega-project to revitalize Toronto's waterfront, which will see its first communities occupied in 2007 and 2008. If Hutchison gets his way, they will be showcases for both technology and "smart" services to improve urban living.
Having already won the ICF's highest honour in 2002, Calgary recently took the next step by hosting a large thinktank on opportunities for Albertans who are now connected to provincewide high-speed Internet.
A production of the Alberta SuperNet Research Alliance, headed by University of Calgary professor David Mitchell, the conference looked at applications from e-health to distance education to disaster and emergency management.
Axia NetMedia Corp. and Bell, which played major roles in deploying the Alberta Super-Net, were active participants in the conference, as was Shaw Communication's BigPipe, Inc.
Mike Hall, Shaw's senior director of operations, calls his company a complement to the SuperNet, adding, "SuperNet has allowed us to offer all Albertans services that used to be restricted to big cities and big companies."
As an example, he cites multi-homing, a technique used by large firms to ensure that their websites are always up and running. "This used to be only available to the largest customers," Hall says, "but we have acquired a large block of IP address space so we manage them on behalf of small companies."
He adds that a high-speed Internet connection, operating at about 1.5 megabits/second "used to cost an Alberta small business $6,700 a month. Now we can offer that service for $450 a month."
The conclusion of the conference was generally that SuperNet is a wonderful resource, and one that will rapidly be copied in other jurisdictions. Speaker after speaker said what will set Alberta apart is the way the technology is used.
Asked for examples of Alberta innovations, Richard Belzil, executive director of Calgary's Wireless City group, cites an adaptation of technology from the oilpatch that now allows passengers on the Red Arrow coach between Calgary and Edmonton to have seamless Internet connectivity.
This may not be, strictly speaking, a SuperNet application, but it means that business can go on, even while the businessperson is on the move. Belzil also describes a clever system that allows security cameras to work on Calgary's light rail transit trains, even when they're between stations.
With the ICF conference held not far from Ground Zero in New York, and security and disaster recovery taking a place on the agenda at the SuperNet conference, it's clear that these issues are going to be permanent fixtures of our thinking on this subject.
So, in the future, we may all be looking to live in "triple S" communities - ones that are smart, sustainable, and secure.
Web Watch: www.intelligentcommunity.org
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
