The Big Apple is the Big Cheese at Expo

Source: Smart Cities World on November 17, 2016

New York has been crowned as the Best Smart City of 2016 in the Global Smart City Awards, announced at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona this week.

The award recognises the most outstanding initiatives and projects in the urban innovation and transformation industry. Aspern Smart City Research, based in Austria, also scooped an award for its integrated energy research project and the Kenyan company Microclinic Technologies’ digital health platform came away as a category winner.

The NYC Strategy for Building to Smart + Equitable City initiative, promoted by Mayor De Blasio’s team, has the ambitious plan to make the Big Apple a global benchmark for smart technologies. It is based on four fundamental pillars: Link NYC, to expand connectivity among citizens; Marketplace.nyc and UrbanTech NYC to grow the innovation economy ecosystem; a programme for piloting and making informed solutions about scaling smart technologies; and a strategy for the responsible deployment of connected devices and IoT implementation. So far a total of 20 cities have adopted the protocols.

In the Innovative Global South category, co-organised with the United Nations Habitat III programme and presented for the first time in 2016, the winner was the Kenya Transforming Healthcare project by Microclinic Technologies. Seizing the potential of IT technologies, the initiative has digitised a total of 12 health centres (one referral hospital and 11 county hospitals) and implemented video-conferencing for both remote consultations and doctor training.