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Smart Cities

Canada’s pervasive urban challenges include rising income inequality, aging population, lack of affordable housing, traffic congestion, and decreasing municipal budgets. These problems contribute to rising urban inequality across Canada as city services and opportunity for socio-economic advancement are becoming more geographically segregated between rich and poorer communities.

Enter Smart City solutions…

A Smart City deploys intelligent urban technological systems to serve socio-economic development, and to improve quality of life, and address the origins of social instability in cities, there:

  • Empowering sustainability
  • Driving economic growth
  • Delivering safe and reliable services
  • breaking down silos
  • Creating an open pathway to innovation, leveraging the power of data
  • Engaging citizen participation

Unlike in transactional cities, information in Smart Cities — in the form of metrics, events and processes — must be shared across organizations in a near real-time manner. With the support of analytics programs, city-wide operational processes using data from any number of domains can continuously predict and react to events and trends that are affecting the city.

Global Advantage Consulting Group has conducted comprehensive assessments of the feasibility of implementing Smart City concepts in Southern Ontario and provided strategic recommendations to government on developing Smart City policy, strategies and funding models based upon global best practices. Contact us to find out more about our Smart City initiatives.

Get in touch with

one of our experts

Peter MacKinnon

Senior Associate

Peter MacKinnon has a rich background working in the public and private sectors as well as in academic and international institutions. For example, for the private sector he worked for Cognos as Director of Corporate Development and later as Director, Computer-Aided Software Engineering. For the federal government he has worked for the Ministry of State for Science and Technology, as a Special Advisor on Advanced Information and Communication Technologies. Academically he has worked as an adjunct professor of engineering at Carleton University and at the School of Information Technology and Engineering at the University of Ottawa as Executive Director of WiSense (Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks). He is currently a Senior Research Associate in a Smart Cities Lab in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Partner with Global Advantage.

Michael Rowell

Lead Research Analyst

Michael Rowell is a lead research analyst at Global Advantage Consulting Group. Contributing in various capacities since June 2020, he has a Masters in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, along with a Joint-Honours bachelor’s in Political Science and History from McGill University.