Stratford, Ontario
Mayor Dan Mathieson
Founded as a mill town on the river Avon, Stratford developed an economy made up of automotive manufacturing, agriculture and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the city’s largest employer. But while vital, agriculture is no great generator of good-paying jobs, and North American automotive manufacturing faces historic challenges. Stratford’s leaders have moved with speed and determination to create a new foundation for prosperity based on digital media. The city-owned utility has built out a 70-km open access fiber network with a WiFi overlay. Not content with the speed at which private companies deployed services, the utility has launched its own commercial and residential ISP offering connectivity, including fiber to premise, at half the cost of the competition. As well as digital progress in the arts sector, Stratford General Hospital operates an e-health portal used by 85% of the city’s family physicians. Among other services, it provides remote diagnosis of X-ray images submitted over the network, and the hospital has more than doubled the number of radiologists on staff to meet demand. Two large-scale data centers for major banks are under construction or expansion, and entrepreneurial ‘lone eagles’ are developing smartphone apps, online collaborative-creation tools and GPS applications. With new foundations firmly in place, Stratford sees a digital future filled with promise.
Oulu, Finland
Mayor Matti Pennanen
Over the past 200 years, Oulu has seen industries come and go, from tar and wood in the age of sail to leather goods, fishing and heavy equipment manufacturing. Since the start of the financial crisis in 2007, Oulu has managed to create 18,000 jobs in high technology, thanks to risk-taking in education and strong public-private collaboration. To strengthen their economic impact, Oulu has guided the formation of multiple R&D organizations, from the Center for Internet Excellence to Oulu Urban Living Labs. They are platforms for innovation where business and researchers collaborate to advance technology and test it in real-world situations. When Ericsson opened a new R&D center in Oulu, it cited the city’s unique research environment. The government of Oulu has also created an intensive culture of use for information and communications technologies. The PanOULU WLAN Network provides free wireless coverage through 1,800 access points. The Competence Oulu 400 Project has trained more than 9,000 mostly elderly people, and the OmaOulu Citizen’s Web Portal simplifies e-government with a customizable page for every citizen and advanced social media systems. Highly educated citizens working in synch with business, educators and government has created a dynamic economy ready for the risks and rewards of a global market.
New Taipei City
Mayor Eric Chu
The capital city of a nation tends to cast a long shadow. That shadow is a daily presence in New Taipei City (NTPC), a former county surrounding Taiwan’s capital city of Taipei that was incorporated as the nation’s largest and newest municipality at the end of 2010. NTPC is mountainous, which means 80% of residents live on just half of its land. The result is a severe urban-rural divide, which is matched by a digital one. Thirty percent of residents – generally the elderly and aboriginal populations – have no computer, a high number by Taiwanese standards. The national government’s M-Taiwan project has installed an open-access fiber backbone in NTPC for use by private carriers. NTPC has leveraged this investment by subsidizing carriers to extend the network into its mountainous regions and new trade parks. Of the 88% of households with Internet access, 62% have fiber-based connections to date, with a goal of connecting all schools and 80% of households at 100 Mbps by 2016. NTPC is also home to 22 universities and colleges, of which 3 are among the top 100 universities in Asia, and graduates 37,000 students annually. NTPC’s government encourages these schools to co-found incubators and launch join innovation projects with the business sector. Much of that business development effort is focused on two industrial parks. With nearly 100% of public services online, and innovative access and training schemes bringing thousands of citizens online for the first time, NTPC is poised to become a global center for ICT innovation.
Barcelona, Catalonia
Mayor Xavier Trias
Spain’s second largest city, Barcelona is a financial, tourist, exhibition and cultural center on the Mediterranean coast. In this city, tech-based innovation has a physical address: 22@Barcelona, a digital district that is the home of a series of projects uniting business, the university sector and government to create economic growth and improve the city’s quality of life. Aiming to regenerate an old industrial zone known as the “Catalan Manchester,” the city created 22@ to house its growing information and communications technology cluster, which includes global brands like HP, IBM and Fujitsu as well as homegrown innovators. To lay the foundation, city government blanketed much of Barcelona with a WiFi mesh to run city services and deliver Internet access to citizens and businesses. Within the district, the city began piloting technologies from charging stations for electric vehicles to fiber to the premise. Going one step further, a project called Virtual Memories engages secondary school students to develop multimedia projects in collaboration with elderly citizens, preserving their memories while introducing them to the potential of digital technologies. With this range of projects, Barcelona aims to create an environment where the world’s most innovative companies will feel right at home.
Ipswich, Queensland
Mayor Paul Pisasale
Ipswich is the oldest city in the state of Queensland but one with its eyes set most firmly on the future. As early as 1996, Ipswich had a digital inclusion policy for its library. When Australia’s National Broadband Network called for proposals for local deployment in 2009, Ipswich decided that its best opportunity lay in joining forces with neighboring cities and promoting a “Western Corridor National Broadband Network” as a logical site. The strategy worked and NBN put 2 of its total 19 nationwide First Release sites in the Corridor. Responding to the post-industrial crisis, city leaders launched successful efforts to attract two universities and create new retail and mixed-use developments including a data center and fiber network. The latest version of the plan projects a near tripling of the population and the need to create 120,000 new jobs through 2031. It includes an InfoCity Plan that details how its new NBN broadband assets will be used to deploy e-business, e-learning, e-health and e-government services.