Calgary is a smart city. The future is here, and Calgary is ready. What is a Smart City, and how do we ensure that Calgary Is ready for the challenges of tomorrow? Please find out how Calgary is evolving with citizens’ needs to remain resilient. With a shifting economic environment, an ever-changing technological landscape, and new social opportunities, smart cities approaches are more important than ever.
Now and in the future, all Calgarians benefit from a smart city. A smart city delivers real value to citizens and businesses through innovative solutions and proves every aspect of community life.
Calgarians are always looking for opportunities to be a smarter city and invest in making our citizens’ lives better. Calgary is one of the most liveable cities on the planet, with an excellent quality of life, low taxes, and terrific access to nature on our back doorstep. The City of Calgary is part of that success story; we’re thousands of Calgarians serving the city we live in, the city we love. We’re building Calgary’s future by making smart changes today.
The Smart City of Calgary has been performing smart services and funding in smart infrastructure to help to make a community better for many years. However, The City is always looking for opportunities to be a smarter city and make citizens’ lives better. A key measure of success for a smart city is improving the livability and opportunities for a city and its people through connecting technology and data. Calgary smart stories highlight how real people benefit from innovation every day.
The Smart City of Calgary created a bold community proposal to Infrastructure Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge. Calgary’s submission to the Smart Cities Challenge Although Calgary’s submission was not selected as a finalist, the Smart Cities team continues to work with the community and pursue collaborative ways to achieve high-level outcomes aimed at making an impact for all Calgarians and to deliver some of the proposed projects.
The Smart Cities Challenge fostered a collaborative spirit between government, academia, and industry within their community. The insight gained from the Smart Cities Challenge will help Calgary focus on specific areas important to Calgarians and continue to make smart investments that will help make life in Calgary better every day.
Challenge statement Calgary will transform into Canada’s most comprehensive and flexible community by uniting all Calgarians, enabling access to the services, supports, and information they need to be engaged and lead fulfilling lives, and increasing economic diversification to create more job opportunities. Why was this challenge statement chosen? The 2017 Vital Signs Survey found that 78% of Calgarians reported they were concerned about the level of poverty in our city, with 25% of respondents rating their ability to find suitable employment as poor or below average.
Through the Quality of Life and Vital Signs Surveys, Calgarians overwhelmingly identified that they valued relationships and felt connected and their community. The need for creating more jobs and opportunities has been identified as a big issue in our community in the wake of one of Calgary’s worst economic downturns. Calgary’s unemployment rate went from 4.4% in November 2014 to the highest rate in Canada in July 2016 at 10.2%. In December 2017, it was 7.2%, which is still above the national average. Our submission proposed some very big ideas poised to transform how we connect and cultivate opportunities for Calgarians.
Dark Matter Smart Cities Made Human
An experiment in civic innovation from Calgary.
Dark Matter YYC is an experiment about developing a technology-driven smart city from the citizens’ perspective. Technology can create humanizing, accessible, and inclusive cities. The Future of a Smart City Calgary activates a community around this important topic and documents this journey.
Dark Matter YYC seeks to illustrate a Smart Calgary by addressing the following questions:
- How might a smart city improve Calgary’s quality of life and livability?
- How might we use the city as a living lab, to experiment and learn before adopting new technologies?
- How might technology build better relationships among citizens?
- How might citizens participate in the design of a smart city?
- How might we apply technology to make civic government more efficient simultaneously? …and cultivate trust? Why? “Dark Matter”
When technologists describe cities, they describe the visible — the mechanical parts, electronic gadgets, physical features, and infrastructures. These components are efficient, if impersonal, and make life better for residents. When sociologists describe cities, they describe the invisible — the relationships, interactions, experiences, and culture of a place. In this way, the city is a feeling. Cities personalities. They can be welcoming, hopeful, dignified, ambitious, prosperous, and flourishing.
On the other hand, they can also be tyrannical, dehumanizing, and impoverishing. They can do all of these and more at the same time. How do we know if we are successful? If we engage a wide and diverse number of citizens in terms of perspectives and lived experiences If citizens engage with us and contribute ideas and experiments to Dark Matter YYC, If the civic government adopts the citizen perspective in smart city designs.
