Glenelg Shire Council
With a diverse mix of industries and thriving communities, Glenelg Shire covers an area of over 6,000 km in South West Victoria. The Shire provides the option of coastal living or a rural setting, and with a number of schools, a university campus as well as hospitals and commercial amenities close by. It’s the perfect place for its 19,000+ residents to call home.
Glenelg Shire is governed and administered by Glenelg Shire Council. The Council strives to keep its communities more connected and engaged, provide better services and ultimately make the Shire a better place to live, work and visit.
The Challenge
The Council recognises the positive impact digital technology can play in enhancing the liveability, workability and sustainability of their community and aims to develop a smart city framework to deliver on these ambitions.
The Solution
Effective stakeholder engagement in the planning and implementation stages of a project is key to delivering a successful project outcome. A diverse group of Glenelg Shire stakeholders were engaged by the GHD Smart Cities team of strategists, engineers and emerging technology specialists to seek their inputs so that the smart city framework and proposed strategy were aligned to Glenelg’s vision, goals and local requirements.
A list of potential initiatives that were stress tested from numerous perspectives were shared with the stakeholders. Most importantly, the selected initiatives had to be directly relevant to the local circumstances of the Glenelg community and environment, and not drawn from a generic list of typical smart city applications that might be found in a dense urban setting.
GHD also introduced a range of innovative commercial and execution models with the aim of expanding the funding pool beyond the Council’s internal funds.
With the project currently ongoing, the council is focusing on finalising the framework, roadmap and governance model. GHD is supporting by identifying potential partners to lead or support selected initiatives; and advising on the communications strategy to ensure the strategy is genuinely owned, recognised and supported by the community’s residents, businesses and other stakeholders.
The Benefits
Glenelg Shire Council and the broader community have already received a number of benefits from the expertise of the GHD Smart Cities team including:
- Raising the profile of Smart Cities with a range of external stakeholders
- Providing a robust framework through which any future potential smart city initiatives can be assessed
- Providing an extensive list of potential initiatives that are balanced between goals of liveability, workability and sustainability as well as the short, medium and longer term
- Introducing an initial external party who may be willing to fund one of the identified smart city initiatives on a trial basis.
For more information please Email Alex Piper.