Smart Cities Council Partnership Program

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As swelling urban populations put enormous strain on aging, frail infrastructure and the delivery of basic human services, city leaders desperately need help. They need a trusted, neutral advisor to educate them on the transformative power of technology to solve their daunting infrastructure challenges. The Smart Cities Council provides that help - and so much more! We are a member-driven network of the world’s leading companies providing solutions to the public sector. We advise cities on global best practices to help get them from confusion to activity. We are currently accepting new Partners to help us achieve our mission of building a more livable, workable, and sustainable world. Learn all about partnership benefits, opportunities and fees in the Council's 2018 Partner Prospectus. Get your copy now. Interested in what some of our Partners have said about the Council's value to them? Watch this brief video.


All cities are unique from their geographic layout to their architecture. They do however have common objectives such as the safety and security of their citizenry and the provision of services in the form of utilities and transportation networks. They also face common challenges while attempting to remain competitive in securing sufficient resources to maintain and grow the city. African cities have particular challenges stemming from years of hostilities and neglect of infrastructure. Rapid urban migration of the population is placing demands on existing infrastructure and transportation networks which are beyond their original design. Over the past decade large multinational Information Technology (IT) companies have begun predicting Africa to be "the next big market" due to the emergence of many rapidly growing economies. When compared to mature cities like London and New York, African cities can currently be considered to be behind the ‘competitive’ curve. However this is not a pre-destined outcome as African cities can, through the successful adoption of the ideology and technology underpinning the Smart Cities concept, become globally competitive. It is through the adoption of advanced technologies and lessons learned from mature cities that the anticipated growth need not be one step at a time, but rather exponentially in functional, economic and social aspects. This paper reviews the Smart City concept and focuses on the contemporary African drivers enabling her cities to leap frog the competition into 2025 and beyond.


With the Future X architecture, you can enable the human possibilities of smart cities by interconnecting your systems, processes, activities and citizens. Ease the flow of cars and people with smart mobility services. Simplify bus connections. Offer a real-time view of available parking. Monitor crowds in public venues. Use energy resources more efficiently in homes and businesses, as well as for public lighting. Enhance public safety with video-surveillance analytics, an integrated command and control center, and enhanced communications for first responders. Improve healthcare in your city with remote monitoring applications, while keeping costs under control. Enhance the fun and safety of large events and improve the tourist experience.


80 million to develop a planned community in Arizona. The 25,000 acres of land is about 45 minutes west of Phoenix, in an area called the West Valley. The community, which Gates wants to turn into a "smart city," will be named Belmont. Belmont Partners, the Arizona real state investment company involved in the deal, said in a news release. The proposed freeway I-11, which would connect the Belmont area to Las Vegas, makes the land an ideal spot for a new community, according to Ronald Schott, the executive emeritus at the Arizona Technology Council. Of the 25,000 acres, 3,800 will be used for office, retail, and commercial space.


Another 470 acres will be used for public schools. That leaves enough space for 80,000 residential units. This isn't the first intentional community built to optimize urban life in the area. About an hour north of Phoenix, the experimental town Arcosanti was built by architect Paolo Soleri in the '70s. The retrofuturist site follows Soleri's philosophy of arcology, an integration of architecture and ecology. The town is rumored to be one of the inspirations for the architecture of Star Wars' Tatooine. It's unlikely that Gates' new city will be as ambitious or aesthetically sublime as Soleri's project. But perhaps it will bring utopian ideas of planned communities, mostly abandoned in recent decades, into the 21st century.


ShotSpotter: Detect, Locate, and Alert on Gunfire in Under a Minute. ShotSpotter delivers real-time gunshot notifications to law enforcement so they can dispatch to the precise location of the gunshot, engage with the community, look for evidence and occasionally help victims and make arrests. Their goal is to help drive down illegal gun use. Socrata: Socrata provides software solutions that are designed exclusively for digital government. Socrata’s Data-as-a-Utility platform entirely overhauls today’s government data experience, delivering data-driven innovation and cost savings for hundreds of public sector leaders and millions of their constituents around the world. Transit Screen: TransitScreen is a global information company. Our network of connected screens help make cities healthier, sustainable and more accessible for everyone.


Information about your transportation choices is displayed at a glance, live and in real-time. Compare train times to bus arrivals on your way to work in the morning. Utlility Inc: Utility’s BodyWorn video, audio and metadata can be accessed through its cloud-based digital evidence management solution, AVaiL Web™. Utility’s other solutions, Rocket IoT™ in-car video and Smart Redaction™ application for releasing video to the public, also leverage AWS cloud storage. Uturn Data Solutions: OpenGrid for Smart Cities is an interactive, map-based platform for exploring publicly-available open data sets in an easy-to-use-interface. OpenGrid enables municipalities to offer residents, businesses, and communities a better way to interact with public data. Users can perform advanced queries to filter data as well as search within custom boundaries or based on the user's location.


Veniam: Veniam turns vehicles into Wi-Fi hotspots and builds city-scale vehicular networks that expand wireless coverage and collect terabytes of urban data. In controlled spaces such as ports and container terminals, Veniam’s solutions ensure that all mobile workers and assets are securely connected, no matter where they are or at what speed they are moving. Vizalytics: Vizalytics Technology enable Smart cities and are powered by open data and AWS. We give citizens a real-time view about what's happening in their community and how that impacts going from point to point- whether by mass transit, bicycle, foot or car. West Corporation: The West Safety Services Business Unit’s Emergency Aware Services (EAS) supports public safety use cases that monitor, detect, and report emergency conditions from sensors and devices across multiple organizations. EAS uses business rules and analytics to convert these raw data streams into timely and actionable information for public safety and private industry. The sensor and device information is combined with other contextual data to enhance situational awareness during event, incident, or emergency situation. Data can be collected from smart buildings, smart city infrastructure, and wearable devices to advance public safety through smart technology.


Smart cities and smart city projects have been among the most actively discussed realizations which are made possible by a purposeful and integrated IoT (Internet of Things), data and connectivity approach, leveraging a mix of solutions and other technologies. Although there is an important technology aspect, smart cities are about far more as we’ll see further. One can even debate about the meaning of smart, certainly within the incredibly complex and holistic reality of smart cities where in the end it’s about meeting the needs of citizens and solving challenges of people, society and urban communities. Yet, more about that further in this article.


Until at least 2020, smart city projects are poised to sharply increase as we move from ad hoc smart city projects to the first true smart cities. A universally valid definition of smart cities - do we need one? The announcements on new smart city initiatives and investments are also accelerating and if we look at the major IoT projects, smart city projects are among the leading IoT segments in practice. Lessons of early initiatives get shared and positive returns are reported, further driving the smart city space which is also driven by government investments. More popular smart cities use cases include Prestige Smart City Price parking, smart traffic management, smart street lighting and smart waste management.


Still, also these cases often combine a mix of enhanced efficiency, urban problem solving, cost reduction, better living in urban regions and putting citizens first for a variety of reasons. We previously wrote about research by Accenture that looks at the usage of newer technologies, including the Internet of Things, from a perspective of citizen-facing public services, which found that improving citizen satisfaction indeed by far ranks first. As the infographic of the research indicates, improving satisfaction of employees also ranks high (80 percent) and the implementation of newer, connected, technologies already leads to tangible outcomes in a slight majority of cases.


As mentioned, smart city projects already are all around us, with a constant stream of announcements regarding new ones. Within the segment of listed IoT projects, IoT Analytics fond that the most popular smart city applications are smart traffic, followed by smart utilities. Also city safety is a big one. Although smart city projects mature and new ones are being promoted and/or deployed, it will take several more years before we really can call a city a smart city. Smart cities today are more a vision than a strategic end-to-end approach. You can image that in order to have a true smart city there is a lot of work across the various activities, assets and infrastructure, which can be turned into smart versions. Realizing a true smart city can be incredibly complex as so many factors and parties are involved and cities have numerous tasks and functions.