Executive Summary: City of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
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The first round of the Smart Cities Challenge is closed. The Government of Canada announced the four winners (City of Montréal, Québec; Nunavut Communities, Nunavut; City of Guelph and County of Wellington, Ontario; and Town of Bridgewater, Nova Scotia) on May 14, 2019.
Yellowknife is a place where ambition and ideas can easily turn into reality. It is a small, tightly knit, vibrant community with strong leadership and a desire to foster innovation. The Smart Cities Challenge has engaged the City to envision a future where technology is a key part of everyday life and the design and control of that technology is controlled by clear policy for the benefit of all Yellowknifers.
The City of Yellowknife has done considerable community engagement to understand what a Smart City might mean in the northern context and how it will improve the lives of its residents. The focus of this proposal is on five key impacts: extraordinary skies, tourism, a replicable framework for northern innovation, community connectivity and sustainability. To achieve these impacts there are a series of outcomes that will be attained through the diverse technological innovations to be incorporated into the lampposts much like apps to a smartphone.
These technologies will all be vetted through new strategic thinking that will learn from the best of European and North American Smart City experience to help nurture a Northern Smart City ethos. By pitching Yellowknife as a cold weather lab for smart city innovation, the City will develop replicable plans, tools and ideas that can be spread throughout the north. The focus on dark skies and light pollution reduction will set the City apart in the competitive world of aurora tourism, and provide economic development opportunities and benefits for Yellowknifers. Electric vehicles, improved city services, beacon and geofencing technology and a mesh network will be some of the tools that help the City meet its ambitions of a smart outpost in the boreal forest.
This proposal outlines how the City proposes to take a measured and reasonable approach to reach the stated outcomes that will define success. The Smart Cities Challenge will be the springboard that turns the simple lamppost into a beacon for sustainability.
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