New Zealand ASCA Members visit Melbourne

The New Zealand group on a site visit to Footscray in Maribyrnong City Council.

Pictured L-R: Francesca O’Brien (Manager City Futures, Maribyrnong), Grace de Leon (Christchurch), Julia McMaster (Wellington), Bruce Marshall (ASCA / Maribyrnong), Michael Healy (Christchurch)

In 2022 ASCA signed an MOU which has enabled our first international members from New Zealand to join the ASCA family in the spirit of collaboration and sharing of knowledge between Smart Communities.

On 7th Feb a small contingent of representatives from New Zealand were in Melbourne and were able to schedule in site visits / study tours with two ASCA Members (Melbourne City Council and Maribyrnong City Council) to learn about initiatives being delivered in Australia and share learnings from New Zealand.

The group consisted of Julia McMaster (Wellington City Council), Michael Healy (Christchurch City Council) and Grace de Leon (Christchurch City Council).

When asked for her impressions of the visits, Julia responded:

“As Wellington looks to bring a more strategic focus to bringing together the Council, academia, tech industry and community it was fantastic to see how both Footscray and Melbourne have had a concentrated effort on engaging and up-skilling their community through their programmes. It was really timely to learn about the work City of Melbourne has done on the Sensing Lifecycle to ensure we are implementing robust and resilient networks across the city as we begin to scale up our use of IoT across the city.

It was really great to meet with other cities who are looking at how they leverage digital twin capabilities for their city and I am looking forward to continuing to collaborate and share on our respective journeys.”

ASCA will continue to foster our relationship with New Zealand and we hope to be able to share some of their insights and learning to our broader membership group via webinars and articles throughout the year ahead.