In early 2021, the City of Calgary’s smart cities team was tasked with the development of a strategy and action plan. Given the tremendous amount of change created by COVID-19, and the rapid speed of technological change and adoption, the team felt it was necessary to utilize a future-focused methodology to articulate the strategy’s focus areas. To support this work, Creative Futures designed and facilitated a multi-session engagement process with key City of Calgary decision-makers to identify future-informed focus areas for Smart Calgary’s strategy and action plan.

Our Approach:

• Working closely with the Smart Calgary team, we designed two virtual sessions that met their desired outcomes and were appropriate for their participants.

• Using Sharpe’s Three Horizons framework, participants spent the first session identifying preset-day challenges related to Smart Calgary’s purview and defining an ideal future state.

• Building on this, the second session explored current examples of projects and other jurisdictions that demonstrated components of their ideal state, followed by a discussion of the changes needed to make it possible within their context.

• The session concluded with a prioritization activity which led to the articulation of key themes that were translated into strategic focus areas for Smart Calgary’s strategy and action planning work.

Results:

Through this process, Calgary’s smart cities team were able to identify seven strategic focus areas and an understanding of their prioritization. This information was used as a foundation for their broader strategy and action plan.