Taoyuan County among Smart21 Communities of 2010: ICF

The Smart21 announcement is the first stage of the New York-based think tank's annual Intelligent Community Awards' 12-month cycle.

Taoyuan County hopes to be selected to the Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year for 2010 in January from the 21 nominees announced Friday.

The 2010 Intelligent Community of the year will be named in May from the seven finalists. Taipei grabbed the top prize in 2006 when President Ma Ying-jeou was still mayor of the city.

Sweden's Stockholm won the award for 2009, but Asian communities have garnered the top spot three out of the past five years.

The new Smart21 list represents 13 nations and includes 10 communities that appeared on last year's list. None have populations over 2.5 million.

Taiwan's Taoyuan, Korea's Suwon, and China's Tianjin Binhai are the only three Asian communities on the 2010 list.

Taoyuan County was praised for taking action to offset its high sensitivity to the business cycle and powerful competition from Taipei. The ICF cited its "Aerotropolis" initiative to strengthen the local economy and its "M-Taoyuan" program launched in 2007 to make e-government mobile.

The M-Taoyuan program covers the core of the metro area and offers "real-time traffic analysis, remote monitoring, mobile distribution of information to the public and access to resources for government workers on the go," the ICF said.

The think tank also anticipated the county's "U-Taoyuan" program that "will focus on ubiquitous digital services for aviation, shipping and other businesses, (and weave) digital services seamlessly into the lives of all residents."

Taoyuan County first made it into the Smart21 in 2009, and won the 2009 ICF Founders Awards for the "Aerotropolis" project, a broad and comprehensively planned integration of digital infrastructure and support services for an expanding aviation business cluster.

In announcing the Founders Awards in March 2009, the ICF specifically highlighted the achievements of Taoyuan County Magistrate Eric Liluan Chu, Taiwan's youngest magistrate who led Taoyuan for eight years and is now vice premier.

Taoyuan is hoping to become the second Taiwanese community to win the Intelligent Community award after Taipei.

The ICF said Taipei was the world's largest producer of laptop and notebook computers and computer motherboards, and the city government had made it a priority to reduce the time and resources needed to turn students into productive knowledge workers.

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