San Antonio presents ‘community-driven’ smart city roadmap

San Antonio in Texas has launched a new Smart Cities Roadmap, detailing its approach for using technology and data to improve public services and quality of life in the US’s seventh-largest city.

“The Smart Cities Team’s Smarter Together Initiative lays out a people-centred vision and strategy that is directly responsive to the needs of San Antonio residents,” said Mayor Ron Nirenberg.

The launch follows over a year of stakeholder engagement and introduces new guiding principles based on community feedback to the question: “what makes a smart city?”. The principles are: accessible, connected, efficient, informed, and safe.

A new Smarter Together Testbed will support the testing of smart city ideas, products, processes and solutions. The 2023- 2028 testbed focuses on five themes that San Antonio residents described as priorities during the stakeholder engagement process: access to transportation, access to public information, public safety, safe infrastructure, and resilience and environmental quality.

Informed by an employee survey, the roadmap also identifies three strategic areas of focus expected to have the biggest organisational impact: business operations, data, and resident engagement.

In addition, the roadmap outlines a “refreshed mission and vision” for the Smart Cities team, which was formed in 2017 and is part of the Office of Innovation.

Lessons learned

In an introduction to the report, Brian Dillard, Chief Innovation Officer for the City of San Antonio, says: “Years of project development and achievement have significantly shaped our approach to innovation and inclusion. For the Smart Cities team, this means re-calibrating San Antonio’s innovation ecosystem towards a more proactive vision for our future as a connected, inclusive and resilient community.

“The Smart Cities team is charged with leveraging data, technology and innovation to improve the quality of life for our residents. Doing so in a post-pandemic world means ensuring our use of technology is responsive to the real-world needs of our residents, but also addresses key organisation-wide challenges that impact our day-to-day operations.”

Key lessons cited in the roadmap from work so far include that many city departments share the same challenges, and that “technology that is looking for a problem” often fails to address the real challenges faced by residents. Projects highlighted that city staff on the frontlines of public service delivery are essential stakeholders and collaborators for digital transformation, and that “anyone in our community can innovate”.

The plan also acknowledges that the widespread use of data and new technologies poses risks as well as opportunities.

It states: “Today, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles represent new opportunities for improving quality of life, but also come with significant risks and uncertainty.

“Communities must decide for themselves whether the use of technology is even necessary for solving problems in their neighbourhoods, and if so, how it can be applied in alignment with their values and expectations.”

Dillard said that “when done right”, smart cities can eliminate redundancies and reduce wasted resources, accelerate and enhance innovation and workforce development, ensure technologies are deployed safely and ethically, and address organisational challenges around interoperability, collaboration and communications.