Sponsored by
Produced by
Between September 2014 and February 2015 an exercise was undertaken to explore what a Sheffield smart city strategy could look like. This work was commissioned by the Sheffield Executive Board (as it was then known as) and Sheffield First Partnership, and was carried out by Chris Dymond at Unfolding. The work consisted of three major strands:
Looking at existing research and smart city indices to determine a scope of applications for smart urban technology.
Looking at other UK and European cities to evaluate their published strategies and programmes, and compare their different identities.
Interviews with a large number of local organisations and individuals - public sector, academics and firms both large and small - to gather opinions and to begin to map out historic, current and desired initiatives in the city, as well as analyse cross-cutting factors.
The resulting draft report was intended to form the jumping off point for a deeper and more specific strategy. It consisted of four core components:
An articulated local identity that ties Sheffield’s past and future vision to its strengths and concerns.
A framework that describes the domains in which smart innovation can and should be underway, and serves to map projects.
A set of cross-cutting themes that describe concepts of particular relevance to local urban innovations across all application domains.
An example road-map showing active and proposed local smart city initiatives.
Following the production of the Smart Sheffield report, a number of key challenges were highlighted in a Summary Report that was drafted by Sheffield First Partnership (but also not officially published).
These were that:
Sheffield needs strong city leadership on this agenda, based around the approach set out in this report. Key city stakeholders must work together to put in place the necessary structures to ensure: Sheffield is represented effectively in national discussions; is well connected to major funding bodies and centres of expertise and knowledge; and is driving forwards its own approach to the Smart City.
Sheffield needs to commit to developing a better connected city ecosystem, to ensure key influencers in the city are accessible to those developing innovations, and remove barriers to collaboration between individuals or groups. Leading on this commitment will be a key responsibility of the leadership Sheffield puts in place.
In order to address these first two challenges, the city also needs to commit the necessary resources to ensure that the leadership structures are able to initiate work where appropriate and support existing projects, and draw together the full range of work underway in Sheffield into a cohesive narrative of Sheffield as a Smart City.
Although these reports were never formally published, the original report is in the public domain and you can download it here…
