City of Edmonton, Alberta
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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.
Executive Summary
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"Connected cities have inclusive and innovative spirits that challenge the status quo and overcome barriers collaboratively."
– Final proposal
Challenge Statement
Edmonton will lead the transformation of Canadian healthcare using an unprecedented municipal approach by focusing on leveraging relationships, health data and innovative technologies to provide a personalized health connection and experience as unique as the health of every Edmontonian.
Summary
A Smart City is first and foremost a Healthy City.
Recognizing urbanization and the increasing role residents' health affects and is affected by City services, the City of Edmonton proposes that municipal-level intervention is necessary. The City of Edmonton is facilitating the creation of a Healthy City Ecosystem (a partnership of government, industry, academia and residents) to work collaboratively to provide integrated, community-based health support. Addressing social determinants of health, such as connectedness, loneliness and sense of belonging is an innovative, transformational approach, shifting the focus from treating symptoms to one of prevention.
A smart cities approach will enable the creation of a single Health Data Repository, connecting disparate datasets from the stakeholders and the data collected by new technologies, ensuring anonymity and integration to facilitate assessment, analytics and data mining. Residents will access the new municipal health support through a digital tool and devices, allowing them to identify and access additional services, relationships and technologies to improve their individual health and connectedness.
Spotlight on Finalists:
City of Edmonton, Alberta
Population: 932,546
Focus Areas:
Prize Category:
#smartcitiesCanada
The Jury's Perspective
Read the transcript
So my name is Gabe Sawhney. I'm the executive director of Code for Canada, which is a non-profit. I grew up in Windsor, but I'm based in Toronto.
I put my name in to be a jury member for the "Smart Cities Challenge" because I was really excited about being part of a process that's going to help set our expectations for what smart cities are, especially for them to not be defined by technologies that we want to try to implement and instead have them be really grounded in residents' needs, and for them to be judged based on their ability to deliver positive outcomes for residents, and for residents to be a really important part of the process.
So the city of Edmonton put forward a very exciting and ambitious proposal about health, about the health of residents, and about using data and collaborating to help improve the health of residents. What the jury found exciting about this proposal was that it's very ambitious and that it's using a data-driven approach to improving the health of residents in a way that can only be accomplished through partnership with different levels of government, with a wide range of community agencies and community groups. Building those kinds of partnerships, and those kinds of data-sharing agreements, and addressing all of the privacy and data governance issues are all very complicated and that's what makes this a very ambitious project, but one that will be enormously useful to other communities in Canada.
The Finalist's Perspective
Read the transcript
The smart cities challenge is a competition that called in Canadian communities to explore how data and connected technology can achieve meaningful outcomes for residence.
On screen:
Smart Cities Challenge
Winning communities
School
The finalists
$50M category: City of Edmonton, Alberta
Tell us about your team and your community
Soumya Ghosh (Director of Digital Enablement, Open City and Technology, City of Edmonton): We're the smart cities challenge team from the city of Edmonton. Our challenge statement focuses on improving the health of Canadians using an unprecedented municipal approach. We are really looking to through data and analytics, improve the social determinants of health which will in terms have an impact on the health of residents.
On screen: Why did you enter the challenge?
Soumya Ghosh (Director of Digital Enablement, Open City and Technology, City of Edmonton): When we reached out to our residents, we took those engagements as part of our smart city program even before the challenge was announced. It was a problem that we've always wanted to solve and we always wanted to improve the health of residents. The challenge kind of acted as a capitalist to make things quicker.
On screen: Challenge statement: Edmonton will lead the transformation of Canadian healthcare using an unprecedented municipal approach by focusing on leveraging relationships, health data and innovative technologies to provide a personalized health connection and experience as unique as the health of every Edmontonian.
Join the conversation: #smartcitiesChallenge
Infrastructure Canada
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