What can federal agencies do for smart cities?
Connecting state and local government leaders
Coordinated agency efforts can accelerate the development of smart city/community solutions, a new report suggests.
What: “Connecting and Securing Communities: a guide for Federal Agencies Supporting Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment of Technology for Smart Cities and Communities,” a new report from the National Science and Technology Council
Why: As localities begin to invest in technology-laden smart city projects, they often depend on federal funding. This report provides guidance to federal agencies on how to accelerate these kinds of projects by coordinating activity and aligning their priorities with those of cities.
Findings: Smart city initiatives typically cross traditional boundaries. Making a city safer or more livable, for example, involves transportation, healthcare and public safety policies, collaboration between the public and private sectors as well as entrepreneurs and academic researchers. The "convening power" of the federal government can encourage new partnerships across agencies, sectors and stakeholders and span multiple technology-readiness levels.
To support smart city efforts that facilitate job growth and economic prosperity, the report outlines four approaches:
- Promote fundamental, iterative R&D in areas such as big data, analytics, cybersecurity and 5G and help move smart city innovations to adoption.
- Facilitate local efforts for secure and resilient infrastructure, systems and services by helping communities leverage legacy infrastructure, design and deploy new services, build future capacity and enable collaboration.
- Enable advances through data and knowledge sharing, best practices and collaboration by advancing secure, privacy-preserving data sharing and interoperability, facilitating replication and scaling and fostering global collaboration.
- Enable evaluation of progress and long-term growth of smart cities/communities by developing standards, metrics, and economic models for evaluation that can be easily adapted at the local level and by ensuring a talent pipeline.
Verbatim: "Coordinating efforts across Federal agencies will help accelerate the development of smart city/community solutions that maximize the value of investments, optimize benefits to residents, and improve the way infrastructure is designed, built, and maintained.
Read the full report here.
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