Smart Wellington is the capital’s smart city development program. It has brought together a number of Government, NGO, CivicTech and citizen groups to focus on the issues our city faces, understand our various roles in addressing them and act together to make better system-wide outcomes happen.
Smart Wellington is about continual improvement and learning. The partnerships and technology behind the program have already assisted us to better understand social systems, create better environments and recover from a 7.8 earthquake — and this is only the beginning of our smart city journey.
What is Smart Wellington?
A Smart Wellington is more than having a technically-enabled local government — it’s about having an involved and engaged community and business sector. In partnership with NEC New Zealand and other partners, Wellington City Council has implemented:
- a flexible Internet of Things backbone making the installation of sensors simple, inexpensive and from any provider or maker
- an inter-agency platform facilitating co-operation across the social and community agencies in the city
- machine learning and advanced analytic processing to create further insight into city issues
- putting virtual reality engagement platforms in place to make that data accessible, useful and understandable
- developing our Civic Hacking communities to create new citizen made apps, websites and services using city data.
A core design driver is to make these systems modular, scalable and as open as possible to meet the changing needs of the city.
What is the future of Smart Wellington?
The Smart Wellington capabilities are already delivering new ways to engage with communities to help:
- understanding urban change
- Council processes to become more effective
- Council to address the problems and opportunities of growth.
As technology changes, Wellington is well positioned to create more empathetic, responsive environments. At present Council is scaling up projects like pedestrian mobility to cover the whole city. This investment will help lead to the creation of better street environments and city spaces. In turn, this will help the city and its communities to transition through the disruptions caused by technologies such as autonomous vehicles, new manufacturing technologies and changing climates.
Note
Smart Wellington featured in the Digital Government Showcase, which was part of Digital 5 2018, the 4th annual gathering of the world's most advanced digital nations that NZ hosted in February 2018.
