Strategic planning for future smart cities
The term ‘smart city’ is widely used, but what is a smart city? Definitions vary, but whatever the context, urban ecosystems are complex, and goals such as digital or sustainable transformation can be hard to achieve.
Cities and other municipalities face the continuous challenge of balancing numerous and diverse interests while trying to transform, improve the quality of life for their citizens and become attractive locations for businesses.
Strategic planning can help to understand the needs of stakeholders and to align different perspectives, as well as to find appropriate innovations in order to achieve the vision and goals.
FUTURE CITIES WEBINARS
In our “Future Cities” webinars, we invite high profile speakers from academia and industry, who share their insights on a selected aspect related to the future sustainable growth and development of urban areas.
Informing strategy towards secure, sustainable and smart cities
Two experts in smart cities, Professor Jung Hoon Lee and Dr Alexander Schlüter provide an overview of some of the global drivers and challenges that should be accounted for in the development of future urban ecosystems.
Implications for the strategic planning of the energy transition
In this webinar, Dr Simon Bennett from the International Energy Agency and Dr Diana Khripko from IfM Engage highlight the trends and drivers that cities and municipalities need to think about when planning for future energy.
THE IFM APPROACH
Using multi-disciplinary IfM tools and methods, from strategic planning to sustainability, we help organisations to unpick the complex strategic challenges and develop a systematic pathway towards their defined vision.
This includes working with local authorities, as well as private sector organisations who supply municipalities, to plan for future cities, for example, helping them plan and prepare for the energy transition.
Stakeholder engagement
The complexity of a challenge is often given by a large number of stakeholders that are either impacted by or have influence on the topic. We help our partners to understand who the key stakeholders for the particular topic are and what their requirements and needs are. We also help to develop strategies for stakeholder engagement and solutions that deliver value for them.
Capability development
We like to work in a collaborative way helping our partners to develop skills and capabilities across different levels of their organisation through a blend of training, consultancy and mentoring.
CASE STUDY: STRATEGIC PLANNING TO SUPPORT THE CITY OF MALMÖ
IfM Engage has helped the City of Malmö in Sweden to refine its strategy for the energy transition and evaluate how a pilot project addresses the UN Sustainable Development Goals and other climate targets.
MEET THE EXPERTS
SHORT COURSE
Smart cities: Strategic planning and strategy implementation
This course offers an overview of how a smart city vision and strategy can be defined. It introduces key concepts and practice examples of a smart city, as well as insight about tools and techniques for strategic planning and measuring the success of the strategy implementation, including how new technologies can help to improve strategic planning and deliver on objectives.
Participants will learn methods that favour a fast start and agile implementation in order to achieve quick results, and benefit from exchanging experiences and lessons with participants from other cities and countries.
SHORT COURSE
Smart cities: Strategic planning and strategy implementation
This course offers an overview of how a smart city vision and strategy can be defined. It introduces key concepts and practice examples of a smart city, as well as insight about tools and techniques for strategic planning and measuring the success of the strategy implementation, including how new technologies can help to improve strategic planning and deliver on objectives.
Participants will learn methods that favour a fast start and agile implementation in order to achieve quick results, and benefit from exchanging experiences and lessons with participants from other cities and countries.
RESOURCES
Advancing Communities towards low-Carbon Energy Smart Systems (ACCESS)
IfM Engage is a partner on the EU-funded ACCESS project. The project is working with local authorities Amersfoort (NL), West-Suffolk Councils (UK), Malmö (SE) and Mechelen (BE).
The project aims to deliver a systematic upscaling approach, that delivers pathways and action plans to enable the energy grids transition, transferable to other authorities.
Sustainable and Smart Energy Systems for Europe’s Cities and Rural Areas
This book is about the transformation taking place in energy and digital infrastructure and provides a guide for European municipalities wanting to develop into smart cities or smart rural areas. An international team of authors from the private sector and the world of academia sets out the key aspects of importance for decision-makers.
Dr Diana Khripko has contributed chapters to this book including the chapter on “Strategic Planning of the Transformation Process”.
An integrated service-device-technology roadmap for smart city development
The aim of this paper is to introduce an integrated roadmapping process for services, devices and technologies capable of implementing a smart city development R&D project in Korea.
The paper applies a QFD (Quality Function Deployment) method to establish interconnections between services and devices, and between devices and technologies.
GET IN TOUCH
Contact us to find out how we can support you with strategic planning challenges in your organisation.