Birmingham named in UK’s top three smartest cities
Birmingham has been named as one of the UK’s ‘smartest cities’, according to new research.
The city ranks third in the first ever Huawei UK Smart Cities Index, which measures how well the nation’s urban centres are utilising digital technology to improve everything from their transport infrastructure to their refuse collections. Only London and Bristol ranked higher.
, cabinet member for sustainability at Birmingham City Council, said: “This is a fantastic achievement for Birmingham and clearly demonstrates how far we have come as a city in terms of embracing digital technology to improve our services and, ultimately, the lives of those who live, work and visit here.
“We must now build on this success, continuing to look for innovative ways to make best use of the latest technology to further improve the way we operate as a local authority.”
For the full background on the Huawei UK Smart Cities Index, including how the rankings were calculated, please visit http://www.huawei.com/en/news/2016/5/UKs-leading-smart-cities.
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Notes to Editors
Examples of how Birmingham is a smart city include:
Coding Clubs
Building on the success of the Young Rewired State (YRS) Festival of Code, a week-long event which fosters the talent of young coders, Birmingham plays host to a range of coding clubs which work with young people to teach new coding skills and build digital products using open data. These organisations seek to support a network of coders and designers that will use their digital skills and creativity to address social and economic challenges – with a focus to attract young coders, and those that want to learn, from underprivileged and minority backgrounds.
OPTICITIES
The OPTICITIES project is developing and testing Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) solutions in six cities across Europe in order to provide citizens with the best possible journey conditions and to optimize urban logistics operations.
Participation in the project has allowed Birmingham to develop innovative decision support tools that use predictive techniques to forecast problems on the strategic urban road network and implement traffic management strategies to mitigate disruption to road users. The output of the OPTICITIES project is now being promoted on a wider scale within Europe as part of the European Innovation Partnership to scale up new mobility services in Europe.
About Digital Birmingham
Digital Birmingham is the Council’s digital and smart city delivery team who work collaboratively with its Smart City Commission and delivery partners to transform the way services are delivered through the application of digital, data and smart city technologies. For further information, please visit: http://digitalbirmingham.co.uk/
