Location Intelligence and Citizen Engagement: Key Factors in Making Smart Cities

By utilizing location intelligence, Smart Cities enable efficient utilization of resources, people, money, assets, and information. Smart City programs have started gaining momentum with the tech-savvy generation, offering pathways to better economic conditions, sustainable development, quality of life and improved governance. This trend is being driven by a number of factors, like reduced technology costs, free mobile apps, social media platforms, cloud computing and effective ways of managing high volumes of data. The ultimate goal of a Smart City is to enable the government and citizens to understand, communicate, access and predict urban functions more efficiently.

Role of Geospatial Technologies in Enabling Smart Cities

To effectively deliver the services that make Smart Cities work, local governments and urban local bodies require real-time, location-based strategies. Understanding these strategies helps them inform their solutions and responses, and include everything from providing health and education services to the inspection of street lamps and sewers.

Location Intelligence Provides the Key to Making Smart Cities

The amount of geospatial data we collect grows every day. This constant stream gives us the raw materials we need to derive meaningful insight for urban planning. It is being used to improve a number of smart city services including smart housing, smart transportation, infrastructure management, asset management, utilities, and disaster prevention.

Hexagon Geospatial solutions fuse geographic sensor data with business information, transforming knowledge and customer workflows. As a city grows, local governing bodies can build an intelligent information ecosystem, empowering them to quickly sense, decide, and act. Our dynamic geospatial portfolio gives confidence in and control of the entire workflow to city stakeholders. We enable users to transform location-based content into actionable information. Our solutions use satellite imagery, aerial photography, remote sensing, CAD, and GIS to transform raw geospatial data into the building blocks for making informed decisions.

Citizen Engagement Another Key Factor in Building a Smart City

When it comes to city services, people are no longer complacent doing things the old fashioned way. For instance, we are no longer content to wait in long queues to pay their utility bills. Citizens can access the information related to their electricity consumption via an SMS and pay the bills from the comfort of their homes or offices with just a few simple clicks.

This is not all: we can save on energy consumption by using new mobile applications to turn off our lights and adjust the temperature in our homes, even if we are halfway around the world. We can also Reduce our electricity bills by switching to renewable energy or an alternate source of electricity. With every passing day, technology innovations are being explored and services are being developed for improving the quality of life for citizens. These emerging technologies are not only convenient, but they add to the influx of location-based data available to us to make our lives – and cities – smarter.

Our solutions equip smart cities with a robust platform to share and disseminate city information and proactively engage with citizens while embracing the dynamic changes across the city in real-time. This versatile technology supports multiple platforms, including cloud, web, mobile and social, in addition to traditional desktop and intranet platforms.

To learn more about the use of geospatial technologies in building smart cities, join us at upcoming smart city events in India. Atanu Sinha, Director-India and SAARC will share the stage with other key influencers in the session “Role of Geospatial Technologies in Enabling Smart Cities” at the 3rd Smart Cities India Expo 2017 Expo on 12 May 2017.

3rd Smart Cities India 2017 Expo
Pragati Maidan
New Delhi, India
10 May, 09:30 AM – 12 May, 17:00 PM