Kyiv Smart City: Digital Infrastructure

KYIV SMART CITY:

DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

BY YURIY NAZAROV

The Kyiv Smart City project shows it is possible to find solutions to smart city technology problems in the new reality.

Today, I will tell you about Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and about our experience with implementing smart city solutions. When we started Kyiv Smart City, we decided to develop a smart city concept where we identified key areas that we should transform—like transport, municipal utilities, government, medicine, and education—and we defined projects that we should implement in the next five years. How? We surveyed more than 2,000 citizens. We included modern tech companies and government employees, and according to their voting, we defined what we needed to do.

Next, we built the Project Office, which consists of city government and civil society. Civil society is part of the Kyiv Smart City Hub, where we discuss different problems and collaborate with the city government to solve current tasks and issues in our city. We also built the technological platform, where we integrated and started to implement new systems for solving different tasks. We followed two typical smart city models divided into several layers: infrastructure, data, services, business intelligence, and International Operation Center (IOC).

Transparency & Efficiency of City Authority

We implemented an open budget where we opened all information, financial transactions for citizens, incomes, and expenses. We opened this information to understand what is currently happening in our city.

Next, we implemented electronic procurement. All of our purchases are on this electronic platform, which saved more than half-billion dollars in five years. We also implemented a GIS (Geographic Information System), a platform for collecting and operating data such as land and municipal property management.

Our ERP is a system that includes all city subsidiaries and departments—things that we can control, expenses in every department— that we can analyze in one click. The BI Platform collects information from all modules and systems that top managers and citizens can analyze. Of course, we use this information in the IOC for coordinating and controlling municipal utilities.

With our Contact Center, you can call or use the app to take a photo of a problem and immediately send it to the center. A manager redirects the report to special utility services to solve your problem.

e-Democracy

In the e-democracy area, we launched e-petitions, where citizens can identify a city problem. If they get 10,000 followers that vote for this petition, the government looks into solving it. Our participation budget is an element where we can spend money on projects and tasks that interest citizens, like building sporting grounds, building schools, repairing apartments, etc. According to that, we realized more than 1,000 citizen projects, and citizens are happy that the money was spent for the needs they decided.

City Services

Through the Kyiv Smart City app, we provide services like paying for utilities, parking, and using public transportation to bring children to kindergarten or go to the doctor.

The Kyiv Resident Card is a banking card where residents pay for different municipal services with a discount. For social groups, we can provide different programs and discounts. For example, when pensioners use the card, they get discounts on bread and drugs and can use public transportation for free. The card also helps us identify the city’s inhabitants, conduct personal history, and give access to city information and communication infrastructure.

If you subscribe to the city informing system, you can receive different information via SMS. It promptly informs about events in Kyiv, including changes in traffic, roadblocks, disconnection of utilities, energy events, blood donors, etc.

There is also a system where you receive immediate information about urgent situations like fires. We also deployed city Wi-Fi in public places and public transport, which is very useful for our citizens and tourists.

It is very important to open all data and provide it to citizens. But our key issue and

strategic vision is not only to open data but provide access to this data so our innovative community can develop services and solutions for citizens. The portal was created to improve the quality of services offered to citizens, in particular to ensure open access to data published by the Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA), district administrations, enterprises, institutions, and organizations with ease of use, clear visualization, and accessibility through one access point.

We installed GPS records on all public transit, and we built a Command Center for things the city can manage. Using this data, we support innovators and companies to build their businesses and provide these services to citizens.

Safe City

In an area of the city, we installed more than 7,000 cameras. We deployed a cloud platform for collecting data and implemented a video analytics system with car number recognition, facial recognition, and other opportunities.

We built 12 monitoring rooms for municipal needs, national police, and special security services. We solved not only the public safety task but also municipal tasks like transport management because we can calculate traffic flow. And we use this system for controlling road repairs, garbage removal, snow removal, etc.

We use city drones for different tasks for monitoring the city and urgent situations. For example, our firefighters and police use drones for situations in public places or criminal incidents. We also deployed alarm buttons in public places that connect you to an operator in the national police.

Technological Solutions

Smart lighting is an element of reducing the cost of lighting and increasing its intensity. We deployed this platform and installed different sensors like air and water quality. At our Command Center, we collect the information from cameras, dispatching systems, and IoT to react to different incidents and coordinate municipal services. We also have a reserve data center for disaster recovery and replication information. For solving city tasks, we built a network infrastructure. We deployed fiber-optic channels throughout the city, connecting schools, hospitals, and kindergartens.

Support of the Innovative Community

We built the Kyiv Smart City Hub, where we provide access to data and information systems through API for building new startups and services for our citizens.

We use our city like a living lab. For example, if you have a new sensor or camera, it’s not a problem to install on a bus stop and connect to our IoT or CCTV platform for testing and launching this solution and for making products and future services for our citizens. In our Smart City School, we have different coding courses for children where we discuss problems and tasks in our city and support our innovators.

Forum

And, of course, a key element is promoting the smart city in our country and Eastern Europe. Every year, we have the Kyiv Smart City Forum, where we have an exhibition zone and a speaker zone where we discuss solutions, tasks, problems, and how the smart city can support modern cities.

Yuriy Nazarov

Smart City Committee Chairman, Ministry of Digital Transformation

Kyiv, Ukraine

Yuriy Nazarov, Chairman of the Smart City Committee of the Public Council at the Ministry of Digital Transformation/Innovations and smart city technologies expert. He was also the head of ICT at the Kyiv City Council from 2017 to 2020). In 2015, Nazarov became an adviser to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko. He also co-founded the Kyiv Smart City project, which developed and implemented online tools that helped attract Kyiv residents to city development. In 2017, Nazarov became the Head of the Information and Communication Technologies Department of the Kyiv City State Administration.