Smart Christchurch was established to deliver rapid proof of concepts that support the Council’s goals for the city. Through trials, we have provided a de-risked environment to test innovative approaches, to fail fast when needed, to learn, pivot, measure and then to hand over the successful trial to our Council business partners.
Smart Christchurch explores new technology and innovative trials that help make our city a smarter, safer place to live, work and play. New smart technologies and sensors allow us to gather real-time data, so we can see how the city is functioning, and respond appropriately. Being a “smart city” brings many benefits, such as better planning and decision-making, attracting international talent to the city, and creating new business opportunities.
Our Vision
To promote Christchurch as an exemplar open and connected city, showcasing solutions that make life better and are replicated by others.
Our Mission and Values
- Open data, open platform, open city.
- Foster Christchurch’s reputation as one of the world’s most connected cities
- Pursue a secure, open and accessible platform for city data
- Champion the technology advances – making data available to all
- Aggregating and visualising real-time data.
- Combine existing and new sensor technology to build a wealth of detailed city data
- Use insights from aggregated data to plan more effectively, highlight opportunities for efficiency, and create a city that works better for people
- Position Christchurch as an international seismic centre of excellence, with a world-first array of sensors enabling defendable decision-making
- Leveraging the collective genius around us.
- Bringing innovators together to collaborate on solving city challenges
- Removing barriers to access.
- Improve wayfinding and access to transport, by putting accessible, real-time information in people’s pockets
- Provide free Wi-Fi in the CBD to give residents and visitors access to all the digital information they need, enriching their experience of Christchurch
- Inspiring fresh thinking.
- Spark peoples’ imaginations and foster innovation in our city
- Increase networking and collaboration opportunities
- Demonstrate the effectiveness of 21st-century approaches such as crowd-sourcing data, participative democracy, and using sensors
Our Guiding Principles
- Benefits without borders; we share our solutions with whomever can benefit from them
- Innovation moves too quickly to focus on perfect – we get the job done.
- Collaboration is better than competition at both a local and national scale; we respect our colleagues and help them achieve their goals.
- Think globally act locally; wherever possible we choose local partners to solve Christchurch problems.
- We appreciate the value of both digital and intangible assets and look at the best ways to leverage these to the city’s advantage
- Efficiency – right-size processes support rapid delivery and accelerate innovation.
- Fail fast and fail well – salvage what we can and leverage from our learnings
- What gets recognised gets repeated; celebrating success encourages high performance and motivation.