Framework

A Framework to enable and facilitate your city’s transformation into an Ethical Smart City.

3. Strategize

Goals for your Smart City Plans are set while considering the potential impact of these goals.

Generate goals based on the  values, challenges and technology available to your community. Evaluate the potential impact by forecasting possible scenarios.

In this step, you will be able to actualize the insights from the previous step, Personalize, into goals for your Smart City projects. Once you build a holistic view of your community’s values as well as potential barriers, you will be able to strategize this understanding into specific goals. These goals will become the criteria to prioritize and evaluate Smart City projects. 

Ethical Smart City goals are a synthesis of the understanding of the prioritized values and needs of the communities. The active involvement and input of the relevant stakeholders in the goal-setting process will ensure the alignment of these goals with the community’s needs. 

To ensure that the Ethical Smart City strategy is holistic, potential future scenarios are also drawn up in this step while considering the enablers and barriers identified in the Personalize step. 

St. Albert, Canada illustrates how to strategize intentionally, upholding community goals, while Taiwan champions the use of forecasting in identifying the correct solution for their communities.

Generate

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Strategize with Intent

Developing a strategy for Smart City projects is dependent on how well Smart City Champions understand their community and its context. An Ethical Smart City strategy needs to be grounded on the aspirations of the community and what can be accomplished and implemented by the municipality. The outcomes of this step are meant to serve as a reflection of the community values and facilitate strategizing with the intent of protecting these values. To define the goals of a project through engagement with relevant stakeholders, Smart City Champions first identify and narrow down the systemic challenges that technology could potentially help solve. This helps prioritize projects to ensure that they are implemented by the municipality. At the end of this step, Smart City Champions are able to create Smart City project goals that are built through a reinforced understanding of their community’s needs and values.

The generative output in this step is supported by the ESC Goal- Setting and Scoping Canvas tools. Either of these tools can be used to visualize the systems contributing to and affected by your systems. 

Precedent

How did St. Albert define their goals as a Smart City that championed their community?

The municipal leaders in St. Albert recognized the opportunity to modernize their community by becoming a Smart City in 2014. Find out what St. Albert did to determine their smart city strategy goals.

Tools

Evaluate

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Strategize Considering Potential Impact

The success of a community in becoming an Ethical Smart City depends on the municipality’s capacity to prepare for future disruptors. This requires building an understanding of the potential impact of the Smart City strategy on the stakeholders. By analyzing its possible impact, you can identify who in the community is being excluded from the benefits of the proposed solutions and the opportunities for improving these systems. 

At the end of this step, you will be able to assess the gaps and risks associated with your Smart City strategy.  These foresight and forecasting activities will enable you to visualize future scenarios—the plausible, the probable, the possible and the preferable ones — exploring the various ways in which the community’s challenges will be resolved. 

The evaluative output in this step is supported by the ESC Foresight and Environmental Scan (STEEP-V) tools. Either of these tools can be used to analyze the systemic future of your solutions.

Precedent

How was Taiwan able to control the COVID-19 epidemic?

When COVID-19 was announced, Taiwan was expected to follow the trajectory of the 2003 SARS outbreak and be the second hardest hit. This was not the case and has managed to control the spread of the virus while minimizing disruptions in their citizens’ daily lives. Find out what Taiwan did to prepare and strategize for the pandemic.

Tools