City of Greater Sudbury Smart Cities Challenge Application The Smart City Living Lab Section I: Applicant information Question 1: Name of community: City of Greater Sudbury Province/Territory: Ontario Population: 161,531 Indigenous community: No Question 2: Please select a prize category. $10 million (population under 500,000 residents) Section II: Preliminary proposal Sub‐section 1 – Problem definition Question 3: Challenge Statement The City of Greater Sudbury is mining for new economic growth and social inclusion by developing a Smart City Living Lab to provide an inclusive technological platform for innovation that improves residents’ lives, adds new tech jobs and nurtures bright minds looking for a place to shine. Question 4: Please describe the outcome (or outcomes) your proposal seeks to achieve by elaborating on your Challenge Statement. Purpose Greater Sudbury wants to eliminate the effects time and distance can have on lifestyles by installing infrastructure that improves connections across a vast municipal footprint. By creating economic and social opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable, the potential for improving economic, financial and social well‐being for all significantly increases. Outcomes and Goals This Smart Cities Challenge will drive economic growth, create workers for the new digital economy and good local jobs that ultimately sustain and increase population. This proposal produces sustainable smart city technologies tested in the City of Greater Sudbury and exportable to other small or mid‐sized cities. The Smart Cities Challenge funding allows the City of Greater Sudbury to leverage broadband fibre connectivity which already exists throughout much of the city, and existing partnerships and collaborations, and enhance and expand the scope of innovative work already occurring in the community. The Smart City Living Lab also leverages and improves processes to engage the community in providing input into solutions that improve the day‐to‐day lives of residents in Greater Sudbury. The City and its partners will apply lessons learned from the collaborations already underway in the City’s mining and mining supply sectors to develop technology innovation for municipalities. For example, innovation is already being successfully promoted by organizations such as the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT), which facilitates private and public investment in innovation. The Smart City Living Lab will provide a standards‐based terrestrial network located in digital corridors throughout Greater Sudbury. Digital corridors would be located within different town centres that comprise the City of Greater Sudbury. The Lab would also provide a common Open data standard‐based repository for collecting and sharing smart city data. The Lab would provide free Public Wifi in town centres. The Smart City Living Lab would be a pre‐setup environment where a business could readily connect to the Lab to design, develop, install and test smart city solutions. By attracting innovative companies to develop solutions the Smart City Living Lab would generate economic growth and jobs as solutions are developed and exported beyond Greater Sudbury. This proposal includes local secondary and post‐secondary school partners with the intent that the Smart City Living Lab be available for them to create training for workers required to develop and support smart city solutions. In support of the job growth goal, the proposal includes a sub‐goal of removing barriers that could restrict workers from getting the training needed to participate in the new digital economy. To address this, the Smart City Living Lab shall provide free Wifi to areas of the city with high unemployment and low income. In addition to benefiting the city with sustainable growth, the Smart City Living Lab has the spin‐off benefit of providing public Wifi in town centres which provides digital access and inclusion for citizens. Further business innovation partners could connect smart solutions for parking, traffic or health care, and more, to the Smart City Living Lab and each would have spin‐off benefits. The following list summarizes key stakeholder groups and key benefits or outcomes this proposal delivers for them: 1. Community: This stakeholder group includes residents and visitors to the city. • Improved City services, as innovation business partners implement solutions. • Engagement and the ability to provide feedback and ideas to innovators. • Inclusion: free, public Wifi will be provided in town centres within the city. • Inclusion: free, public Wifi will be provided in areas of the city with high unemployment and low income. • Education opportunities. • Employment opportunities. 2. Innovator Business Partners: This stakeholder group includes for profit and not‐for‐profit businesses that choose to develop and test their smart city solutions in the Smart City Living Lab. • Access to a connected cross‐city network enabling them to install Smart City technologies with low set‐up costs, for example Internet of Things (IoT) sensors for lighting, networking technologies, and other. • Access to a standards‐based smart cities Open Data repository and application interfaces (APIs) to enable them to develop and test applications. • A harsh northern climate and geography with many lakes to test their technologies. A vast municipality with an urban core surrounded by a rich mix of small urbanized areas and rural living. • Co‐promotion and recognition for their contribution. 3. Education: This stakeholder group includes all forms of education institutions. • Students will have access to the same standards‐based connectivity, Open Data and APIs as the Innovator Business Partners above. • Students will have the opportunity to collaborate with Innovator Businesses and use their technologies. Students will benefit from rich cooperative work experiences while other partners benefit from their study of new and innovative technologies. 4. The City of Greater Sudbury: • Provides significant opportunity to realize a core aspect of our mission: to provide leadership in the social, environmental and economic development of the City of Greater Sudbury. Investment by innovator business partners could reduce City of Greater Sudbury costs to implement smart city based projects, for example traffic light management systems. • Ongoing lower costs to sustain the technology infrastructure since one principle of the Lab will be to avoid duplicate core components, such as single standards based network for IoT connectivity, all data stored in a single data catalogue. • Economic and job growth and, ultimately, assessment growth. 5. Other Communities: • Reusable proven smart cities solutions designed for Canadian mid‐sized and smaller cities with large distances between communities and more subdued economic growth. Current State and Community Opportunities Greater Sudbury is a diverse community, with low population density resulting from having one of the largest municipal geographic boundaries in the country. The following provides a brief description of the uniqueness of the area, and the reason why such a challenge is embraced by the community: • The City of Greater Sudbury is the largest city by population in northern Ontario, and the largest city by geographic area in Ontario with an area of 3,627 square kilometres. • The city is the result of amalgamation of the former City of Sudbury and six area municipalities: the Town of Onaping Falls, the Town of Capreol, the Town of Walden, the Town of Nickel Centre, the Town of Rayside‐Balfour, and the City of Valley East. These former area municipalities are separated by significant distances, and form distinct town centres and surrounding neighborhoods and rural areas. • There are 330 freshwater lakes within the city; more lakes than any other municipality in Canada. • Greater Sudbury is home to the world’s largest integrated mining complex and is recognized as a leading source of ideas for mining innovation, best practices and environmental stewardship. • There are 5,000 kilometres of mining tunnels under the Greater Sudbury area. • Greater Sudbury serves as the regional capital of northern Ontario; functioning as a regional hub for business, retail, health care and education. With a trio of outstanding post‐secondary institutions, including Laurentian University, Cambrian College and Collège Boréal, Greater Sudbury is the educational capital of northern Ontario. Laurentian University is Ontario’s first designated bilingual university and the only one with a tri‐culture mandate and strong indigenous connection and programming. Laurentian is also home to the eastern campus of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, the first school of architecture built in Canada in over 40 years, the Goodman School of Mines and the Bharti School of Engineering. The post‐secondary institutions act as local incubators for talent. The geographical challenges of the Greater Sudbury area present several opportunities for innovation, investment and applying the principles of a Smart City. From an innovation perspective, in the mining service and supply sector, Greater Sudbury has established itself as a centre for mining research and development. Approximately 17,500 people are employed in Greater Sudbury’s primary mining or mining supply and services sectors which produce $4 billion in annual gross domestic profit. Within Greater Sudbury, several key community partners are already actively engaged in developing and promoting innovation both in