Transforming the City

BY GUY ELAD

An overview of Tel Aviv’s digital services for residents, a real-time management system of city data, and cooperation with startups to accelerate innovation.

When Tel Aviv began its smart city program a few years ago, we started by taking many services and making them e-services. We opened a digital club for citizens called Digi-Tel, a personalized web and mobile communication platform that included those e-services. If you want a yearly parking permit in your neighborhood, you can only get it online. If you want to see your building rights, they are online. If you want to register your child for kindergarten? You can do that as well.

But for us, this wasn’t enough. We had to personalize the service to each one of our residents. But first, we had to learn a little bit about them: their age, marital status, how many children they have and their ages, their hobbies. By knowing this set of data, we can proactively send them personalized information and services.

Personal Proactive Information

So what is proactive information? Let’s say a water pipe on your street breaks. We can send you an SMS saying that the pipe is broken, and it will be fixed in the next few hours. Or, say we have an activity for children in the community center in your neighborhood. If you have a child in the relevant age range, we will send you an SMS invitation. We also cooperate with the city’s theaters and cinemas, so when a show is not fully booked, we offer tickets to residents by sending them an SMS with a discount.

We also arrange a lot of free events in the city. For example, every Friday, we offer a yoga class on the rooftop of city hall. We also developed an app that allows people to rent beach chairs and parasols with a discount for residents.

Does It Work?

In the eight years that we have been working with Digi-Tel, we have more than 240,000 people registered, which is around 80% of the population with whom we can interact. That’s really powerful.

The most important community is parents with children around 3 years old. We have about 20,000 parents that already belong to this mini club, and it’s very successful. We also have a club for the city’s dog owners called Digi-Dog, where we provide discounts to pet businesses and public activities for dog owners. The app even provides a reminder of their dog’s vaccination date.

Resident Engagement

Now, is that a smart city? We wanted to do more. We wanted to engage residents and make them our partners. So we did a lot of participation events. For example, we have a project of renovating each neighborhood, but before we started, we asked residents what they thought should be renovated.

We also have an app to report hazards in the city. We send feedback that we received the report, and residents can see the status. When the problem is fixed, we report back to the resident. We are trying to make the residents understand that the municipality supports them and enriches their life in many ways.

But we wanted to do more. We wanted to be able to run the municipality in a smarter way. Therefore, we developed a real-time system that integrates data from reports from residents, municipality workers, and supervisors and IoT devices spread all over the city. Each department in the municipality gets an online view of the data that is relevant to them. We are also trying to encourage community

©TEL AVIV-YAFO TOURISM BOARD/GUY YECHIELY

©TEL AVIV-YAFO TOURISM BOARD

involvement by organizing hackathons that address real challenges in the city.

Creating a smart city is not a sprint; it’s a marathon. You have to plan your vision and the goals you want to accomplish. It’s important to share your ideas with many departments to change the mindset and lead them to change. When you engage the citizens, do a lot of publicity, and encourage them, you will find you will have a strong partner.

Guy Elad

Deputy Chief Innovation Officer, City of Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv, Israel

Guy Elad is the Deputy CIO and Director of Operations & IT Services in the Division of ICT & IT in the Municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. Before his current position, he was Lieutenant Colonel at the C4I branch in the IDF.