What’s a smart city? Here’s a working definition:

Smart cities use advance information and communication technologies to collect, communicate, and analyze data to improve the design and operations of a city’s core systems, programs, and citizen engagement for greater efficiency, effectiveness, and equity, thus improving the city’s sustainability, resilience, and quality of life.

In more practical terms, smart cities take on many different flavors depending on priorities and inherent characteristics.

In Fremont, we’ve been defining our own smart city agenda based on a series of conversations and cross-functional, collaborative workshops. We started by looking at our existing efforts currently underway — smart traffic signals, EV charging stations, the Pulse Point smart app, and roadway video surveillance.

 

 

Then we thought about the projects we’d like to engage in — everything from autonomous mobility on-demand to predictive disaster warning systems and open data initiatives.

These existing and future projects fall into five buckets:

  • Mobility
  • Public Safety
  • Energy and Environment
  • City Operations
  • Community Engagement

 

 

To date, we’ve established a vision and proposed values to guide our work. We’ve formed an Action Team to serve as both a catalyst for new ideas and a brain trust for moving important projects forward. An interactive matrix will track our progress and help prioritize projects based on multi-faceted criteria.

Although Fremont is early in this journey, we are excited by this creative approach to meet the big picture goals of being competitive, climate change savvy, and transparent while also taking advantage of the practical benefits that come from the work, including organizational alignment, adaptability to changing technologies, and better positioning our City for potential funding and partnerships.

We wouldn’t have made it this far without the buy-in and support of every department, and guidance from our consultant CivicMakers who has summarized this project on its website: https://civicmakers.com/projects/fremont-smart-city-action-plan/

 

 

Fremont’s goal is to be a recognized leader in smart city solutions by 2047. In the meantime, keep your eye out for innovative approaches, solutions, and pilots coming from the Fremont team.