Innovation

City smarts

What does it take to be a smart city? Johannesburg is working on it.

24 August 2021

The City of Johannesburg’s Integrated Annual Report for 2019/2020, a document of 582 pages, mentions the word ‘smart’ 53 times. Right up front, in the late mayor Geoff Makhubo’s foreword, it says the local coalition government has adopted the smart city as one of its strategic priorities, along with things like economic development and sustainable service delivery. Elsewhere, there are references to ‘smart infrastructure’, ‘smart economy’ and ‘smart service delivery’. Smart seems to have become a byword for the efficient delivery of services, even if some of these objectives appear to be aspirational.

The report also says it wants to implement an intelligent technology platform for the Metropolitan Bus Company and Rea-Vaya to enable, among other things, real-time reporting and ‘seamless integration to our core systems’. Covid-19 has also provided smart opportunities, one of which is a track and trace programme, which, the report says, will have the ‘ability to read the location of a citizen and use other means, like Bluetooth’. It’s also implemented an incident management system to keep track of cases.

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