10 Brilliant Presentations on City Innovation

Communitech 's Future of Cities 2022 program has spent the past 9 months searching for the best of the best innovations in Canada that can address municipal challenges relating to citizen engagement, city collaboration, transport, emissions, and asset management.

We started by building a community of hundreds of leaders, innovators, experts and pioneers from scores of public, private, not-for-profit, and academic organizations across Canada. Together, we explored and defined 30 complex municipal problems before launching a national campaign in which we asked Canadian innovators: how might you solve one or more of these problems?

What happened next? Well, we received 105 submissions from 71 top notch startup and scale-up tech companies coast to coast. These submissions were assessed by a team of 44 subject matter experts, including senior decision makers from Canadian municipalities, and from those 105 submissions, we selected the very, very best to present at our September 13 Solutions Showcase.

In case you were not able to attend - or in case you were and would like a refresher - here's a wee summary of the presentations for your viewing pleasure, arranged under thematic headers, so you can zero in on the theme that's nearest and dearest to your heart!

Asset Management

Asset Management is a big priority for our municipal stakeholders. Together we identified 7 challenges relating to this theme and these fell into 2 sub-themes:

Infrastructure maintenance & optimization, with key characteristics including:

• Mitigating the impacts of climate change
• Understanding infrastructure asset condition and functionality
• Supporting improved lifespan and optimization of infrastructure assets

Visibility & decision making, with key characteristics including:

• Understanding the impacts of climate change
• Managing infrastructure asset utilization
• Economically viable deployment of IoT infrastructure at scale for meaningful insights across entire cities

End-to-end workplace and access management

Our first presentation of the day came from Aaron Short , Founder & CEO of B-Line . B-Line provides an end-to-end workplace and access management platform to predict tenant needs in real-time. What I think is really brilliant about this solution is that B-Line seamlessly integrates into existing security systems, meaning you don’t need to replace existing infrastructure.

Here’s a super short presentation with more deets!

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Proactive road and roadside asset maintenance

Visual Defence is a pioneer in the development of artificial intelligence technologies for proactive road and roadside asset maintenance. Right now they help more than 150 municipal partners inspect assets faster and more efficiently, with ROI consistently realized within just a few months!

Here's a presentation from Visual Defence CTO, Roy Tal on how it works.

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Automatic sewer inspection

Amb.AI 's automatic sewer inspection solution feeds directly into existing asset management systems, which is a big deal for municipalities that are reticent to yet another thing to their already fragmented systems. Think that’s good? Get this! Amb.ai’s solution, called Sewer Intell, is up to 90% faster, 78% cheaper, and 70% more accurate than the current manual process.

Amb.ai's ceo & Co-Founder, Samer BuHamdan, Ph.D., P.Eng. delivered an informative and entertaining presentation on at the event; enjoy!

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Proactive identification of asset distresses before they become expensive

Eye for Infrastructure really gets word play. They also really get asset management. Put it this way: would you rather pay $1,000,000 to repave 1 mile of road or just $30,000 to maintain or repair 1 mile of road? It’s a no-brainer, right? Eye for Infrastructure’s platform proactively identifies and addresses asset distresses before they become expensive, meaning that this solution more than pays for itself!

Check out Eye for Infrastructure Co-Founder, John Zelek 's presentation for more info.

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Emissions

Our second theme of focus for the event was Emissions. Future of Cities stakeholders identified 5 challenges relating to emissions. These fell into 2 sub-themes:

Benchmarking & goal setting with key characteristics including:

• Enabling measurable impact of sustainability initiatives
• Increasing visibility on GHG emissions

Vehicle emissions with key characteristics including:

• Addressing vehicle-dominant transport
• Increasing responsiveness to traffic flow and congestion for reduced emissions and improved air quality

Equitable GHG reduction programs for the built environment

SimpTek provides superpowers to municipalities to design and deploy equitable GHG reduction programs. What’s really really cool about SimpTek is that they have national and equitable capabilities, regardless of whether a community is big or small, rural or urban, low income or high income. SimpTek is a social enterprise on a mission to accelerate a climate positive planet!

Winston Morton , SimpTek's Chief Technology Officer, delivered a great presentation at the event. Check it out!

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Transport

Our third theme of focus for the event was transport. Overall, our stakeholders identified 5 challenges relating to this theme. These fell into 3 sub-themes:

Accessibility & safety with key characteristics including:

• Equitable access in the context of mobility, gender, age, or socioeconomic background
• Balancing the movement of delivery trucks/fleets for businesses with the mobility needs of citizens across all modes of transport
• Increasing the safety of active transit/micro mobility

Vehicle-dominant transportation with key characteristics including:

• Increasing the safety, feasibility and convenience of public & active transit to increase and improve citizen mobility

Traffic management with key characteristics including:

• Enabling cities to be more responsive to congestion, air quality, risks & incidents

On-demand ride-sharing to reduce vehicle dependency in urban and rural communities

RideCo On-Demand Transit is an industry leader in transit technology that enables on-demand ride sharing for transit users around the world. Their solution reduces travel time, decreases walking distance, increases service frequency for riders, lowers agencies’ costs per-ride (cheaper than buses!), and attracts net-new riders to transit systems. Even better, RideCo can connect hard-to-reach places, such as low density areas or new communities that don’t yet have transit. Want to try this out in your municipality? Their GR team can help unlock grant opportunities focused on innovation!

Want to know more? Check out this presentation from RideCo Director of Product, Clayton Goes .

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City Collaboration

Our fourth theme of focus was City Collaboration. In many ways this really is foundational to all other aspects of municipal innovation. Overall our stakeholders identified 7 challenges under this theme, and these fell into 2 sub-themes:

Citizen collaboration with key characteristics including:

• Increasing representation and decreasing bias in program development, policy creation and decision making

Internal & external collaboration with key characteristics including:

• External stakeholder alignment to spark action on big problems, such as housing
• Internal stakeholder cross-departmental collaboration and visibility

Solving the housing crisis

Ratio.City, a division of Esri Canada is taking on the housing crisis! How? Using geo-spatial data to provide a framework for efficient land use. By identifying underused assets and sharing that information with the private sector, developments can be expedited, bringing much-needed housing to communities. They’re already working with a number of major developers and are ready to pilot!

Want to know more? Check out this presentation from Ratio.City CEO & Co-Founder, Monika Jaroszonek !

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A "SimCity for real" platform for cities to co-design, explore and share their future

Did you love playing SimCity as a kid? How would you like to play it as a grownup WHILE tackling and finding solutions to really big problems? RWI Synthetics provides geospatially accurate LIVING models of cities and regions, complete with their people, policy, technology, and infrastructure in which communities can sandbox any sophisticated futures, to inform integrated urban (re)development.

Want to know more? Check out this presentation from RUNWITHIT Synthetics CEO & Founder, Myrna Bittner !

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Citizen Engagement

Our final theme of focus for the event was Citizen Engagement. This is a huge concern for municipal stakeholders, with a total of 13 challenges identified under this theme. These fell into 3 sub-themes:

Citizen trust & participation with key characteristics including:

• Citizen trust in objectives and applications for data collection
• Citizen participation in the development of programming, public policy, and decision making that is representative of the entire population
• Citizen engagement in infill housing development i.e. how do they feel about it, and what are the key areas that would win or lose citizen support?

Accessibility with key characteristics including:

• Supporting the mental and physical health of citizens & communities
• Providing citizens with seamless & equal access to services, information technology, and green spaces

Effecting social change with key characteristics including:

• Meaningful citizen engagement in addressing complex social issues
• Understanding and tackling complex social issues, like chronic homelessness and drug addictions

Restoring citizen trust

Citizen trust in municipal governments is a big barrier to innovation that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable communities. Without trust, municipalities are unable to understand the needs of these communities, which means they cannot develop effective programs and policies. The solution? Helpful Places provides an open-source standard to increase transparency and accountability for digital technology in public spaces.

Helpful Places President & Co-Founder, Jacqueline Lu , explains it all in this brilliant presentation!

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Interpretation services to connect and engage vulnerable communities with community programs

Canada is an important destination for refugees and one in four Canadians have a mother tongue other than English or French. As one of the most diverse countries in the world, this is a vital aspect of Canada’s national identity, but hospitals, schools, and governments are challenged by getting competent interpreters and a language barrier is a barrier to full participation in civic life. Voyce provides on-demand access to interpretation services in 240 different languages, including some indigenous languages, at the touch of a button.?

Jason Grier is the Senior Advisor, Public Sector Engagement with Voyce, and his presentation is well worth watching. Check it out here!

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