ASTANA – The Kazakh capital has entered the world’s top 21 intelligent communities according to the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), the akimat (city administration) press service reported.
The Smart21 Communities of 2017 is comprised of seven cities and counties in Canada, five cities and counties in Taiwan, four cities in Australia and one city each in New Zealand, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The select group of communities, which emerged from a list of nearly 400, will now compete for a place in the Intelligent Community Top 7, to be announced in Taipei, Taiwan in February. One of the seven will then be named Intelligent Community of the Year at the Intelligent Community summit and awards dinner June 8 in New York, according to the ICF report.
This year’s list of smart cities was chosen by a group of analysts led by Norman Jacknis, the former head of Cisco, the world’s largest IT company.
ICF co-founder John Jung noted the list included communities using digital tools to build the local economy and society in an age of digital inequality.
“We find that it is the ones who collaborate with national or state governments, fly under the radar and are ‘no name’ communities to most of the world that are most innovative and aggressive,” he said.
“They are not afraid of new ideas and use strategies proven by intelligent communities around the world. They are places that the rest of the world can learn from and offer hope to people who are fighting hard to launch a new future and create early stage investment opportunities to the outside world,” he added.
ICF previously named the capital among the world’s top 21 smart cities at the ICF Smart21 symposium in Ohio, USA in 2014.
