Working with city partners, we successfully applied to join to the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilience Cities – a global programme that supports cities to become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges of the 21st century.

As part of our membership the city has just appointed its first ever Commissioner for Resilience who will work with public, community and private sector partners over the next two years to develop a long term resilience strategy and implementation plan.

Membership of 100 Resilient Cities also brings a wealth of resource, expertise and new learning to the city. Belfast will have access to international toolkits, service providers and partners from the private, public and NGO sectors.

This is a significant gain for Belfast and the timing could not be better. There are opportunities to embed resilience thinking into long term planning as the City Council develops its first Spatial Plan.

A small number of UK cities are already members of the program including London, Manchester, Bristol and Glasgow.

Belfast was also chosen to take part in 100RC’s 2018 CityXChange summit. The event brought together a small number of cities to work with leading tech companies and a number of innovative start-ups to collaborate on a range of city challenges.

Belfast Skyline

Using machine learning to support business rates collection

We explored how data analytics and machine learning can maximise the accurate collection of business rates, as well as maintain an up-to-date register of businesses in the city.

Titanic Memorial, Belfast City Hall

Building a personal visitor experience

Our tourism industry is thriving; we have a unique offering and our visitors love it. We’re working with partners to find better ways to collect, share and analysis real-time tourist data in order to build the world-class offering.

Securing smart cities

Belfast is gaining a global reputation as a cyber security hub with the Centre for Secure Information Technologies now the largest cyber security centre in Europe.