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The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) has named Melbourne, Victoria, Australia the 2017 Intelligent Community of the Year during the ICF’ s annual Summit. Melbourne succeeds Montreal, Quebec, Canada as the think-tank’ s annual Intelligent Community of the Year.
Melbourne was selected as the 2017 Intelligent Community of the Year after a year-long evaluation that included a quantitative analysis of extensive data, site inspections by the Intelligent Community Forum, and votes from an international jury made up of experts from around the world. Communities in the Awards program are evaluated based on six Intelligent Community Indicators and ICF’ s annual theme, The Internet of Cities.
Melbourne is Australia’ s second largest municipality and the capital of the state of Victoria. A leading financial center, this city of 130,000 is at the center of a metropolitan area of 4.5 million people and is hub for the Australian film and television industries. In 2016, The Economist named Melbourne as the world’ s most livable city for the sixth year in a row. Melbourne’ s top score for livability is partly the product of a community plan called Future Melbourne. In 2016, the city began to refresh the plan, renaming it Future Melbourne 2026, through meetings of a Citizen’ s Jury made up of residents, workers and business executives. To broaden participation, it created a digital forum called Participate Melbourne, which lets members of the community contribute to decision’ s shaping the city’ s future. The result has been 970 ideas for projects and a program of events that engaged participation from 2,000 people. Meanwhile, the 250,000 registered users of Participate Melbourne logged more than 50,000 sessions in a single year. Working together, the people, businesses and institutions of Melbourne are building a future that leverages the city’ s strengths while working to close the gaps left by the past decade of development.