NSW Smart Places Strategy
NSW recently announced its Smart Places . The Smart Places focuses on building sensors and technology into infrastructure to benefit NSW citizens. Some of the potential applications include real-time air quality sensors, smart traffic signals and smart water meters for residents.
Customer-centric CivicTech
NSW’s Smart Places Strategy has been built around the customer, around NSW citizens. With customers at the centre, the strategy has six key focal areas:
Skills, jobs and development
Safety and security
Environmental quality
Equity, accessibility and inclusion
Health and wellbeing
Collaboration and connection
Skills, jobs and development
In this area, the focus is on creating high-speed internet connectivity to create jobs and drive productivity. Specific initiatives will focus on realising the benefits of open data, increasing digital literacy, using smart technology in places/locations, and ensuring a culture focused on innovation.
These initiatives will build on existing work, such as NSW’s Future Transport Digital and the Sydney Innovation and Technology .
Safety and security
This focus area aims to improve citizens’ safety and the general security of NSW while also reducing the crime rate. Initiatives will cover things like smart CCTV, smart lighting and emergency push-button systems.
These initiatives build on existing work, such as the Critical Communication and Enhancement that’s consolidating separate radio networks for emergency services into one shared network.
Environmental quality
In this area, the focus is on saving resources, reducing emissions and monitoring the environment. Initiatives include smart water meters linked to phones so citizens can monitor their water consumption, solutions to reduce carbon emissions, and environmental forecasting.
These initiatives build on existing pilot programs in environmental sensors and carbon-neutral towns.
Equity, accessibility and inclusion
This focus area looks at smart route planning, smart transport options to reduce commute times, using smart technologies to provide contextual history, and using data and technology to connect public places and people.
These initiatives build on existing work, such as improving regional connectivity and multimedia artwork at Barangaroo .
Health and wellbeing
In this area, the focus is on improving the health and wellbeing of NSW citizens. It includes monitoring and modelling air quality and environmental conditions, using smart technology and solutions to encourage physical activity, optimising health data, and telehealth.
These initiatives build on existing work, such as Sydney’s walking and a virtual hospital .
Collaboration and connection
This focal area concentrates on bringing people, businesses and government together. It includes setting up new partnership models, open data and data-driven solutions, and improving citizen engagement.
These initiatives build on existing work, such as input from healthcare professionals through virtual reality modelling when building the $740 million Liverpool Health and Academic , and digital models of infrastructure assets.
Salsa Digital’s take
Smart cities are an important deliverable for digital transformation in government and the GovTech and CivicTech movements. They bring together technological advances and areas like open data, which has the potential to change lives and move Australia forward. We particularly like the citizen-centric approach to NSW’s Smart Places ...yes, technology is capable of amazing things, but it should always be driven by user needs, citizen needs. We’re looking forward to seeing the projects that flow from the strategy. While it’s encouraging to see this GovTech and CivicTech momentum in NSW, we’re also keen to explore how these efforts could potentially be shared with other states. This could fit well within the collaboration and connection focus area, extending beyond NSW to other jurisdictions.