Richmond was in the final push for a $10 million prize in the nation-wide Smart Cities competition on Tuesday, but was not selected as one of the winners.
Winning cities were: Nunavut communities; Guelph and Wellington, Ontario; Bridgewater, Nova Scotia and Montreal, Quebec.
Richmond was one of 10 finalists in the national competition asking cities to use technology to improve residents’ lives and, over several months, a team at city hall honed the Smart Cities pitch, which centred on connected technology.
“Around the world there’s literally billions of different devices that are connected to the internet and are producing different types of data. All that data potentially is valuable information, particularly to a local government in terms of how we manage the city,” Townsend, who is also a co-lead of the City’s Smart Cities Project Team, told the Richmond News last December.
“The challenge is, many of those devices don’t speak to each other. They’re not interconnected.”
In its Smart Cities vision, the city has proposed to create an “Intelligent Operation Hub” that will integrate data and coordinate emergency responses in the event of a major emergency, or even in the case of smaller day to day events such as traffic congestion.
In March, the city said it still intended to implement many of the iniatives outlined in its Smart Cities proposal, with or without the $10 million prize.
Congratulations to all the #smartcitiesCanada Challenge winners!
— City of Richmond (@Richmond_BC) May 14, 2019
We thank our partners who worked with us. #RichmondBC's Smart Cities journey will continue . . . pic.twitter.com/b5GXxZ3J3U
