West Hollywood Smart City
Strategic Plan

Cityfi created the West Hollywood Smart City Strategic Plan to turn bold, progressive ideas into lasting innovations, and create a human-centered smart city that is connected, welcoming, and innovative. The plan included strategies to build internal capacity, new policy considerations, approaches to leveraging data in decision-making, and deploying pilots to test the impact of new technology.

Context

In 2017, the City of West Hollywood embarked on the development of an ambitious initiative to holistically weave technology into the fabric of the city and turn bold, progressive ideas into lasting innovations.

The city has been facing rapid technological changes, and has begun embracing more flexible and nimble approaches towards serving residents. While technology is being integrated throughout the city, a larger policy framework is necessary to facilitate innovation, boost organizational capacity to manage change, and enhance more analog, less tech-oriented features of a city that are essential to a high quality of life.

Method

The goal of the West Hollywood Smart City Strategic Plan was to provide the City with a multi-phased roadmap to efficiently incorporate smart technologies into urban infrastructure and leverage that technology to improve citizens’ quality of life, health, safety, and economic prosperity, by focusing on projects that promote Sustainability, Mobility, Accessibility, Resiliency, and Transparency. Cityfi led the multi-disciplinary planning initiative with a preliminary focus on building a “Smart City Hall.”

In addition to working with the City’s Innovation Team to define measurable objectives for the next three to five years, Cityfi led a series of engagement activities with internal stakeholders, civic leaders and the public. Activities included supporting internal management meetings to link the strategy to the work already underway at City Hall; designing and hosting a series of workshops to explore a more user-centered approach to a smart city; a day-long open house for city staff and the public which included presentations of international best practices, ways to prioritize opportunities, and a general education session on smart cities; a public innovation event with demonstrations of potential technologies; a panel discussion on best practices from other cities, and yet another opportunity for the community to weigh-in on the location of potential smart city pilots and discuss neighborhood opportunities for innovation.

Cityfi also supported the development of a public-facing website which adapted the strategy for broader consumption and created a graphic novel to tell the story of how smart cities impact visitors, residents, and business owners with visuals that cross cultural and language barriers (i.e. no text).

DSC_0191.jpg
Screenshot+2020-11-30+at+4.06.30+PM.jpg

The plan is currently being implemented by the City of West Hollywood. It was on the cover of the March 2019 issue of Planning Magazine, by the American Planning Association (APA). It also won the APA Technology Division’s Smart Cities Award in 2019.

Two years after its launch, the 5-year plan’s implementation is nearly halfway complete and the City is on track to meet its goals. The City recently published a progress update to show its progress on various goals.

“The initiatives of the Smart City Strategic Plan are set to be complete in 2022. But we know the work will not be done, as being a smart city means a continual cycle of innovation, testing, learning and implementing new ideas.”
- Kate Mayerson, City of West Hollywood

Project Information

Client: City of West Hollywood

Location: West Hollywood, CA

Partners: SOM, Steer, Iteris