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Looking around on articles on the world’s smartest cities, we tend to celebrate the high-tech pioneers implementing large infrastructure or data projects. Smaller cities can play an important role in driving innovation in or near metropolitan areas of a major cities and creating new markets. Sant Cugat (population 80,000, near Barcelona) and Eindhoven (population 213,000, near Amsterdam) are good examples.

As demand for quality environments in our cities continues to increase, more attention is being paid to the opportunity presented by urban revitalisation as a sustainable alternative to broad scale urban renewal. Around the world urban revitalisation is being catalysed by housing, cultural, retail, infrastructure and city centre projects that spur on infill development, adaptive re-use and other local investment.

The city of Eugene, Oregon, has been working its way through the process of planning for future growth over the past 20 months, using various public engagement tools.  Early on, it became evident that we would need new and different media formats to inform and engage people at different points in the process.   For major public conversations such as creating a community vision, we held large workshops with plenty of opportunities for small group discussion.  For feedback on interim staff proposals, we have used surveys, on-line comment forms, and meetings with community groups.  Throughout the process, staff has maintained a Facebook page and comprehensive website with current project videos, maps, and documents posted as they are developed.

Many municipalities across the country have been exploring recent Gov2.0 tools, including “ideation” platforms, in hopes of finding ways to help combat common issues of towns losing money, property revenues declining and jobs going away.  Such ideation platforms like Ideascale  and Spigit, create a place for citizens or employees to submit, rank, and follow up on ideas that can save money and improve services.

New York City rang in the new year with a new internal innovation software platform.  A division of Spigit’s idea management platform, “Simplicity” is being adopted city-wide in a two-phase roll-out that will eventually include all 300,000 New York City employees.

Here at Engaging Cities, we’ve touched on virtual worlds and how governments are capitalizing on the opportunities within them a few times in the past. Slowly virtual worlds are becoming a place for government workers to form communities and collaborate on work as well as provide a forum for education and research.

At times, it can be appropriate to reign in our social media daydreams and scale them accordingly for small budgets and small target groups.  In these cases a few generally accepted mathematical rules of thumb come to mind.  

Future Melbourne is the community of Melbourne’s long-term plan for the future direction of all aspects of city life.When the City of Melbourne decided to use an online platform to support collaboration between itself, stakeholders and the public, they realized a comprehensive strategy for implementing the technology was essential. The ‘Future Melbourne’ website was created using wiki software with the strong belief to not only implement the technology but to proactively address common problems typically encountered in online collaboration.