HCM City aims for "smart city" status

Speaking at a March 10 meeting with information technology executives, Tran Vinh Tuyen, Vice Chairman of the municipal People’s Committee, said: “Information technology is the most important factor in successfully building a smart city, and the city would like to seek solutions and contributions from information technology companies.”
Nguyen Quoc Cuong, deputy director of the city’s Department of Information and Communications, said the city is drafting a master plan to build a smart city in 2017-20 that seeks to ensure a high quality of living and working and sustainability.
“The project should appraise the current digital capability, identify priority fields and then come up with a detailed roadmap to create the smart city.
“The smart city’s central mission will be the convenience of local residents, create an open playing field for all companies and take advantage of all international and domestic resources, and this will need close co-operation between research institutes, scientists, technology companies, and financial organisations.
“City authorities should pledge to support the task and the achievements should be measured based on international standards and the city’s peculiar conditions.”
The city has already begun to work on the smart city programme, creating a common city-wide database with an open eco-system and conceiving links between the smart city and its long-cherished administrative autonomy plans.
The smart city will comprise three technical aspects - a data collection system with cameras, censors, and devices for the Internet of Things and information technology system, a database system, and an analysis system.
“To operate a smart city will require professional managers and staff,” Cuong said.
Authorities would guide universities and research institutes in training requirements, he said.
“The smart city will not depend on any [particular] suppliers and have a unified architecture and easy connectivity between all levels of authorities, from city to commune.”
At the meeting, the IT business executives displayed many solutions for a smart city.