Becoming a Smart City
Cities are becoming smarter by adopting connected technology and using data to solve community challenges.
We believe that by combining smart city technology with an ecosystem that supports entrepreneurship, Memphis can leapfrog decades of disinvestment and realize the benefits of being a Digital City – increased efficiency, improved quality of life, and enhanced equity and economic prosperity.
The Walk on Union is poised to become a first-of-its-kind Digital City. By designing it “smart from the start” and welcoming partners from government, industry, startups, academia and the social sector, we can design, create and test new solutions. This investment in innovation and entrepreneurship will drive economic development including closing the digital divide. By supporting new technology job growth with startups and building opportunities for creating new innovations, our work is relevant to creating new economic opportunity in Memphis.
How and Why Build The Digital City?
Building The Digital City means creating a network of data-collecting devices enabled by a high-speed communications network (Fiber, WiFi). Data will be ethically collected, managed, securely stored, and shared to provide insights and solutions to many stakeholders and partners. This will yield compounding testing opportunities. The Digital City will improve services, increase revenue, decrease costs, and improve satisfaction in the lives of Memphians. With this unique asset, Memphis will be a leading U.S. city for innovation, known as a place where problem solvers can explore, create, and activate solutions.
Who and What?
The Digital City, which relies on its backbone of internet connectivity to facilitate data sharing and insight creation will be invaluable for governments, startups, and major corporations to find innovative solutions to complex problems. That’s what makes this unique: the ability to utilize the data collected from smart city technologies can be useful in alleviating problems in mobility, energy efficiency, and public safety. The future-forward algorithms and software capabilities being built will be instrumental in solving complex problems. Machine learning, data analytics, and artificial intelligence will help us evaluate the data and make more-informed, smart decisions for our community and stakeholders. It’s imperative for Memphis’s future that we create an infrastructure that supports where the world is headed, so that we do not fall further behind.
City of Tomorrow
The success of The Digital City will be instrumental in creating momentum for the digital advancement of the city of Memphis. Similar developments in Memphis and beyond will benefit from the experiences learned and created here. The progress made by The Digital City at The Walk will have a compounding benefit for the community as we’ll touch on in future posts.
It is time to lead with The Digital City.
Look Forward to Future Posts on:
- Data Sharing
- Integrating the Smart City with Entrepreneurship
- Digital Inclusion Surrounding the Digital City
- And more