These papers frame early insight into smart city thinking by Canadian municipal governments and their community members. If future rounds of the SCC are issued, these lessons learned from Round One should help future applicants build more successful submissions.

In the last two years there has been a flurry of activity when it comes to smart city technology and its potential role in Canadian communities. From the project on Toronto's waterfront to the Government of Canada's Smart City Challenge (SCC), since 2017 this conversation has gained momentum and audience.

The Smart City Challenge is different from other vendor-driven smart city projects. In Round One of the SCC, the Government of Canada required municipal and Indigenous applicants, from the outset, to work with their community members. The intention here was to make sure that the technological aspirations pitched in the proposals were aligned with local goals and objectives, and not just funding for what technology vendors wanted to sell. Applicants were also required, at the time of submission, to share their applications on their local websites so that community members could review what was proposed. This decision to make the applications open facilitated research on the SCC, its applicants, and their approaches, and it provides an easy way for communities to learn from each other.

The Community Solutions Research Series includes four papers from a communityuniversity research partnership between Evergreen and my research group in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University in Toronto. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. These papers explore four different, yet complementary dimensions of the SCC. Drawing from a comprehensive review of the Round One submissions, the public participation (Toth), maintenance (Kennedy), circular economy (Simovic) and public health (Ramsaroop) dimensions of the SCC proposals are explored.

In innovation challenges much attention is paid to the winners. These papers are informed by a larger vantage point that comprises the range of projects proposed in Round One. By having this focus, these papers frame early insight into smart city thinking by Canadian municipal governments and their community members. If future rounds of the SCC are issued, these lessons learned from Round One should help future applicants build more successful submissions.

Pamela Robinson,
Director, School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University