About the Conference

In November 2022, we hosted the First Annual Healthy Cities conference in Ottawa, Ontario. Focusing on the central place of food in cities, we discussed key topics such as the use of ‘big data’ to create smart solutions for urban environments, relevant challenges Indigenous communities face, and the many facets of the circular economy in cities of the future. Our goal was to expand the understanding of implementation science and explore how to build and support healthy cities through research excellence, capacity building and knowledge mobilization.

About Our Sessions

Sessions One: Bringing the Convergence-by-Design Approach to Life: Food as Entry Point for Digital-Powered Convergence Innovation and System Transformation in Science, Economy, and Society

Building upon the most advanced health implementation sciences, the SMART training platform set the next frontier with its unique convergence-by-design approach to science, technology, and innovation. The approach is person-centric, digital-powered, and takes a whole-of-society perspective. It positions the person at the centre of the systems of systems that create contexts at community, city, provincial, national and global level. It is a meta-innovation – an innovation in the way we innovate, embedding the research in real-time into real-world individual and collaborative solutions to transform science, economy and society. A short briefing will take food as entry point to discuss challenges and possibilities in the broader context of all dimensions of a person’s thriving and healthy life and the digital-powered multi-sector engagement that only can sustain it for all.

Session Two: Indigenous Health and Healthy Communities as Entry Point for Societal-Scale Innovation and System Transformation

Dietary choices and food security are the major stumbling blocks in achieving a healthy community, leading to negative health issues in the Indigenous communities. This session will be solution-based approaches on food security by discussing the land based Indigenous food systems, and employment of high technology in agriculture for SMART production in the Indigenous communities. Further SMART food distribution and SMART health and economic monitoring require system approaches, thus how co-creating knowledge for system changes in the indigenous communities will be brought by panels.

Session Three: Integrative Big Data, AI and Computing Architecture for Healthy City as Entry Point for a Healthy World: Building an Ecosystem of Digital Twins to Accelerate Real-World Solutions

For many decades now, digital twins for physical objects have enabled the design, test, manufacture and use of their digital version to understand their use in context, the forces at play, the failure risks, etc. This session will propose that a similar approach applied in a modular and distributed manner to society as a whole can inform Healthy City initiatives worldwide. Taking Montreal as entry point, the session will report on the early development of the digital ecosystem “SynthEco” which utilizes statistically representative synthetic populations derived from Census data for a given geospatial granularity as the anchor to create a complex digital ecosystem to analyse individual human behaviour within their environment and, in turn, the decision making and practice of profession, organization, and institution that define this environment. Discussion will bear on challenges and possibilities in accelerating real-world solution to many complex challenges facing traditional and modern society worldwide.

Session Four: Circular Economy and Healthy Cities

This session will highlight the role of the circular economy in support of healthy and smart cities initiatives. The circular economy is more than just about recycling materials but a different way to view how we take, make and use the world around us.  The Our Food Future Initiative in the City of Guelph and County seeks to enhance the ways in which nutritious food is accessed, economic opportunities to stimulate business growth by incorporating circular economy principles in business practices and to reduce food waste from farm to plate. Additional facets of healthy cities ranging from housing, social and business perspectives will be shared by panellists.