The Digital City: Innovation to Address Climate & Equity Challenges
The Digital City is being built in Memphis, Tennessee, a vibrant city with incredible soul that is ready to transform the city into a thriving hub of civic problem solvers. The Digital City invites new partners to embark on innovation programs that are already inspiring new solutions to big challenges. By combining smart city technology with an entrepreneurial approach across 50+ blocks in Memphis’ downtown core, The Digital City is creating a more connected, collaborative community.
High Tech Meets High Touch: People and Technology
The true promise of a smart city is about people, not technology. By integrating smart city technology, data, and innovation, we are accelerating opportunity for everyone, demonstrating the impact of this unique approach.
Partners
Community leaders are forming powerful partnerships across sectors to activate the city’s technology infrastructure and invest in entrepreneurship, overcoming decades of disinvestment.
Our Focus - Climate & Equity
The Digital City partners are addressing complex environmental and socioeconomic challenges – Climate & Equity.
Our Climate Task Force have begun to break down siloed activities in the areas of Mobility, Transportation and Agriculture. Data collection and analysis is a top priority to better understand and innovate around the full value chain from raw materials to consumer delivery while supporting carbon reduction. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent for infrastructure, technology, and carbon neutral efforts. The Climate Task Forces are kicking off collaboration so that these investments from corporations, governments, and other partners can find economies of scale.
Our Equity Task Forces merge Workforce, Black Entrepreneurship and Digital Inclusion with data, technology infrastructure, and analytics to enhance understanding and test interventions. The Digital City partners are already designing and deploying innovations to close that gap and uncover the reality of necessity versus opportunity entrepreneurship.
Our Approach - The Smart City Entrepreneurship Engine
An “Entrepreneurship for Everyone” mentality merges smart city infrastructure, partners and programming to encourage and activate talent to build their own unique, human-centered smart city. The intended result is an inclusive, equitable city powered by technology. The Digital City is based on a core philosophy – The Smart Entrepreneurship Engine – which begins with the foundation of smart city technology and then adds entrepreneurship as the missing ingredient.
This dual approach ensures that the people don’t get left behind; strategies can be customized to reflect unique differentiators, requirements and priorities.
Our Demonstration Area
The Digital City Innovation District
We are civically aligning partner mobility efforts in the downtown Memphis area. Our partners across 50+ blocks in the central business district are creating a mobility testbed to combine transit, parking, pedestrian, land use, and smart technology strategies across five neighborhoods. Our geographic footprint is dynamic and designed to expand to accommodate new partners, projects, and scope. The initial area includes Memphis’ Business District with a focus on Main Street, The Walk on Union, South City and The Edge that includes major downtown assets:
- Renasant Convention Center
- FedEx Forum & Redbird Stadium
- Beale Street
- The Walk on Union
- The Lid public-space improvement
- Central Station
- The Ravine in the Edge District
- Foote Homes/South City
- All Part of an Emerging Innovation District
The Digital City is centered around The Walk on Union, a 40+ acre, mixed-use, smart development in the heart of Downtown Memphis, and extends to adjacent demonstration areas, innovation districts, innovation corridors, and neighborhoods to build distinctive and sustainable solutions.
How to Plug In
Join us in this unique opportunity to problem solve, explore, create, and activate solutions. The Digital City is both the testbed and collaboration framework for partners looking to be at the forefront of smart city technology in the United States to address equity and climate challenges.
