City of Kingston: Building a Smart City

Smart and digital infrastructure are the foundation of a Smart City – but a smart city is about more than technology. It is about people, processes and technology coming together in an ecosystem.

The Smart Kingston Strategy is a roadmap for becoming a smart and livable 21st century city. It recognizes that this means establishing Kingston as a leader among cities by working to make use of emerging technologies and innovations to improve the services delivered to residents and the lives of Kingstonians.    

Getting “smarter” is critical to the future economic growth of Kingston and its region, to empower businesses and to ensure the social well-being of citizens. The Smart Kingston Strategy provides examples and indicates the sources of funding which are necessary to underwrite this Smart City infrastructure. Listed below are a few examples of “Smart Kingston” projects. 

Broadband Strategy 

A smart city starts with broadband digital infrastructure as shown in the Smart Kingston Strategy’s “Virtuous Circle Model.” This model demonstrates an economic and social framework for deploying broadband.      

The City’s Broadband Strategy begins with an assessment of the state of broadband digital infrastructure in Kingston including:  

• mapping coverage of user and service provider networks,  
• recording service provider infrastructure deployment plans,  
• surveying users about the price and performance of the Internet services they receive, and then  
• storing this data in relational database as the foundation for a gap analysis.   

The Broadband Strategy sets out tangible, measurable objectives for closing the gaps in Internet coverage, performance and price, provides explicit strategies for achieving the objectives including budgets and timelines, and performance metrics for measuring achievement of the strategies against objectives. 

Smart Utilities

A “Smart Utility” makes data-driven decisions that generate shareholder value and build better communities. Smart utilities generate value for the City of Kingston by producing dividends and helping to coordinate work between Utilities Kingston and the City. Utilities Kingston is developing a strategy that will help guide its evolution toward smart utility status. This will involve defining communications channels for things, as well as people, ensuring that there are secure and reliable means to collect data from the utility systems and people in the communities they serve. Utilities Kingston will define where data is stored once collected, how we will secure it, and provide guidance on analysis tools. Finally, the smart utility strategy at Utilities Kingston will establish how successes will be shared and how partners will be involved in a mutually beneficial manner.