Since 2012 Guadalajara City has been working on a master plan with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Senseable Lab[1] in order to develop a Smart City to support the establishment of the Digital Creative Industry on the area as an effort to create a new knowledge based economy. In 2013, the first activities based on the master plan started. No place is better positioned to explore these aspects than Ciudad Creativa Digital (CCD) – a project being designed from its inception to become a center of digital creation. CCD aims to enhance not only urban life, but also the identity of Guadalajara and Mexico in the growing media industry involving Internet, film, digital games, and mobile applications – creating a global center of original digital content for the Spanish-speaking world.
An Urban operating system will act as the backbone for the integration of all digital services in the CCD and allow for real-time feedback throughout the city, displaying data on multiple devices and formats for easy access for citizens, workers, and visitors. With this integration of services throughout the city, the CCD can become a leading creative digital city and global showcase, able to export its content and services, business, and governance models to other cities.
For those reasons, Guadalajara was nominated and competed against other cities in the world like San Francisco in the US, Milan in Italy, Medellin in Colombia, and other cities in China and India. The winner city would be selected as a Smart City reference model for the IEEE’s Future Directions Committee (FDC). The FDC has the goal of analyzing the evolution of technologies, to propose where to focus and expand IEEE’s reach and is an incubator of new initiatives. On July 7th, Guadalajara succeeded in earning the place as the world’s first IEEE reference city, in order to cooperate, develop and share the best smart cities’ development practices. On the roadmap, IEEE expects to add every semester two cities per continent to empower the exchange in a common knowledge base as part of a worldwide strategy for the urbanization challenge in the forthcoming years. IEEE FDC includes support to assist the cities with experts from its membership and to create a base of courses, white papers, workshops and an international master program. The goal is to share the experience with other cities in order to create a flagship initiative to support the world’s urbanization challenges.
