New Smart City Solutions

What if you could get effective software assistance monitoring public parks? What would that look like? New kinds of smart city solutions technology are helping us find out, using that critical idea of decision support with a Human in the Loop (HITL) philosophy that makes AI and other tools more effective in urban admin.

Collaborating with NTT Solutions, today’s smart cities are enhancing how public planners and law enforcement officers do their jobs protecting and maintaining our public green spaces. That means understanding the interplay between people and infrastructure, keeping accurate data, and meeting problems head-on. New technology can help leadership teams do all of this more effectively, with better data that can more capably drive decision-making.

Smart City Solutions: Occupancy Tools

One of the key parts of NTT Solutions software for public administration is occupancy control features that monitor park capacity, and the number of people flowing in and out of a park.

City parks get a lot of traffic. For example, look at these numbers: 42 million people annually in New York Central Park, 24 million in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and 20 million in Lincoln Park in Chicago. That doesn’t include the many visitors to small parks all around the country. The pandemic brought a need to control the number of people congregating, even in natural outdoor spaces. That’s a major part of how these technologies assist planners. .

Automated crowd-counting software can help. Because these applications use general statistics, there’s privacy protection in play. With pandemic restrictions in place in many communities, occupant capacity can be a great metric for mitigating the spread of covid while still keeping parks and public spaces open for visitors. Admins that have faced this daunting task can use these types of resources to assist with “counting heads” to monitor capacity for open spaces.

Emergency Management

There’s also the emergency management aspect of these technologies.

Experts find that surveillance systems deter crime. A British study found that criminal activity decreased by 51%after closed circuit televisions were installed in a public area. That’s just one example of what urban planners all over the world are learning—that new technologies can keep us safer.

But it’s not just individual crimes that these types of engineering can help with. From natural disasters to riots, NTT Solutions emergency management tools can provide that top-level data that help public administrators respond capably in any emergency situation.

At the end of the day, most competent planners would probably agree that there are big opportunities in terms of new technology. What that may look like may be something that they don’t entirely agree on, or even understand, in the complex landscape of what’s available. Looking in-depth at tools like NTT Solutions can help.

Broad Utility for Smart City Systems

With the right tools, it’s easier to be confident about where a city is heading. Take a look at what NTT’s smart cities planning solutions can do for a public planning office. These types of technologies are paving the way for smarter public administration in the years ahead.