The small US city that became an innovation leader

Peachtree Corners in Georgia may only have a population of around 43,000 people, but it is making a name for itself in city innovation circles.

The community was recently named as one of five recipients of the IEEE Smart Cities Jury Award in recognition of its work as a testbed for new technologies. It has also entered into a new partnership with the North Texas Innovation Alliance (NTXIA), a regional consortium of nearly 30 municipalities, agencies, corporations and academic institutions, to share knowledge and potentially run joint projects.

In its winning IEEE submission, City Street of the Future, Peachtree Corners was judged on its operational purpose, government progress, UN Sustainability, deployed technology and overall strategy.

City Manager Brian Johnson said the honour was “a reinforcement of its international position as one of the most unique smart city environments in the world.”

A city of firsts

Peachtree Corners launched its Curiosity Lab in 2019, and was the first US city to implement a full cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) solution.

Designed as a ‘living laboratory’ for IoT, mobility and emerging technologies, the
centrepiece is a 4.8-kilometre public autonomous vehicle roadway leveraging CV2X technologies, with additional infrastructure including intelligent traffic cameras, signals and smart streetlights.

“From the first C-V2X system deployed in a US city, the first IoT Central Control Room that aggregates data from sensors across city-owned smart infrastructure, one of the first cities in the country to deploy 5G in 2019, to strides in sustainable mobility with a 5G-powered autonomous shuttle fleet and the first teleoperated e-scooters in America – we’ve helped innovation grow here,” said Peachtree Corners Assistant City Manager and Chief Technology Officer Brandon Branham.

“Companies from across the globe are attracted to our welcoming community, our tech-forward government structure and real-world conditions that can’t be replicated in a closed lab.”

IEEE Smart Cities brings together the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) technical societies to advance smart city technologies and set global standards.

Other winners of this year’s awards included: Roorkee, India (distributed energy storage); Jakarta, Indonesia (flood control system); Coral Gables, US (smart district expansion project); and Berkane, Morocco (smart waste management and control system).

Model for collaboration

“With economic development having been the focus from the beginning, we’ve created a model for better collaboration between public leaders and the top technology developers around the globe to advance the smart city concept in the United States,” Johnson said.

This is backed up by the announcement of the new partnership with NTXIA, which is described as “the largest smart region effort in the United States”.

The collaboration aims to “support the expansion of smart cities across the country”.

On the sidelines of the recent Cities Today Institute City Leadership Forum event in Dallas, Jennifer Sanders, NTXIA Co-Founder and Executive Director, told Cities Today: “What I’d like to do is take Peachtree Corners’ learnings as a smaller community and one that has a structure that is a little bit different. We have pockets of similar things going on with cities large and small too.

“The first piece is to share data and results and talk to mutual partners to really have that strong understanding and share the benefits.”

NTXIA members are particularly interested in mutual learning around successful innovation districts and public-private partnerships.

“Many of our testing sites are innovation districts that are either private property or unique to university campuses but we also have a lot of projects running in the right of way,” Sanders said. “I think we can learn a lot from each other there, and I hope that they can benefit from some of our learnings about testing and scaling in the right of way.”

The new partners are also looking at the possibility of running a joint pilot and comparing the results across different environments.

Image: City of Peachtree Corners