Ethical Smart Cities Tools

The international students at the Institute without Boundaries (IwB), an Interdisciplinary Design Strategy program at George Brown College in Toronto, embarked on a nine month-long project to study “smart cities”. Their unique and timely investigation focused on the trends and forces that impact the design and future of cities. One of the key outcomes from this project were the tools that any community could use to help guide their community toward becoming an ethical smart city. See: https://ethicalsmartcity.com/

The tools to facilitate the ESC transformation process are in the form of a toolkit, a set of tools that have been created and curated to supplement the 5-step process of the ESC Framework. With these tools, stakeholders can strategically collaborate and communicate with each other throughout the process. The tools are accompanied by instructions and have been designed so that you and your communities can use them easily without external facilitation. These tools guide Smart City Champions to achieve the desired outputs throughout the process. These tools have been customized to supplement the Framework so that the process can steer the thinking toward creating Smart City Solutions that uphold communities’ values and needs. These curated and created tools aid municipalities in the process of developing Ethical Smart City solutions for their municipalities. Embedded with prompts and spaces for answering them, the tools provide the structure for what stakeholders should be thinking about at every step of the Framework. Now let’s get started: https://ethicalsmartcity.com/resources/tools/#

IwB partnered with Intelligent Communities Forum Canada (ICF – Canada), the Community Solutions Network and Evergreen, among many others, to research and develop strategies for smart cities that are inclusive, sustainable and ethical. Thanks to Waterfront Toronto for support for the ESC Website and to Paddy Harrington at Frontier and ICF’s John Jung for project guidance.