DEPARTMENT: Office of Innovation
DEPARTMENT HEAD: Jose De La Cruz, Chief Innovation Officer
COUNCIL DISTRICTS IMPACTED: City-wide
SUBJECT:
Information about the proposed SmartSA Innovation Zones Pilot in three SA Tomorrow activity centers including, the South Texas Medical Center, Downtown and Brooks.
SUMMARY:
The purpose of this item is to provide the Innovation and Technology Committee with an overview of the SmartSA Innovation Zones Pilot.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
In FY 2017, the City of San Antonio launched a Smart City Program, called SmartSA. This vision established to help guide future smart cities projects and strategies is to build a connected, inclusive and resilient community supporting a high quality of life. The first two key priorities focus areas are transportation and access to services.
To advance these focus areas, the City of San Antonio is developing "Innovation Zones" to embrace new and emerging smart city technologies, to understand the data it produces and to leverage that information to analyze and predict problems that can be solved by city government and its partners. Innovation Zones will serve as pilot areas to provide an opportunity for the City of San Antonio to test various smart city technologies in a defined geographic area prior to city-wide implementation.
As part of an overall smart city strategy, several U.S. cities including Dallas and Atlanta have created "innovation zones" to pilot various smart city technologies before wide scale implementation. These cities have partnered with private sector companies to test smart city technologies within a defined geographic area, including: smart streetlights, smart parking, sensors, wi-fi connectivity and interactive digital kiosks.
The SmartSA Innovation Zones will support the implementation of the SA Tomorrow regional plans and provide an opportunity to explore capabilities of various technologies in key zones of the South Texas Medical Center, Downtown and B...
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