“Bringing smart living to your city”: An infographic to explore how digital transformation improves the lives of citizens
You and your city planning teams are striving to meet the ever-evolving needs and demands of your citizens while moving to digital technology to increase your city’s efficiencies. You are also looking for solutions to help make your city safer, healthier, and more sustainable. In this space, you hear words like “smart” and “transformation” and “cloud,” but it is not easy to connect these concepts to real technology, real solutions.
Visit our smart virtual city to explore how technology can transform the lives of the citizens in your city. Meet the smart city’s citizens—namely Cassie, Tom, and their daughter Delphine—and read their stories to see how cities can deploy technology to help improve quality of life for their citizens.
Enhance urban mobility
Start your exploration in the “enhance urban mobility” neighborhood. Read how Delphine uses an app provided by the city to assess traffic congestion, seek an alternative to driving, find a reduced bus fare, and pay for the fare on her app. Explore how customer incentives, toll and parking management, and traffic and transit optimization can increase public transit use, reduce congestion and pollution levels, and improve traveler experience—in your city, in the real world.
Build a smarter infrastructure
Next stop in your visit to the smart city is to see how improved facilities management impacts the lives of citizens. On her way to class, Delphine gets off the bus and sees a storm drain overflowing. She takes a picture and opens an app to report the problem, until she sees that other citizens have already reported the problem. Read how, through IoT-powered technology, the city was able to efficiently fix the storm drain, avoid a deluge of incident reports, and keep citizens updated on the repair progress. Explore how citizen reporting and efficient service management can reduce costs and service response times, enhance citizen engagement, and improve energy consumption.
Strengthen public safety
The smart city that Delphine, Tom, and Cassie live in works hard to drive safety efficiencies. Strengthening public safety comes in many forms, including the traffic safety system that tickets Tom for speeding. Wondering if there is a mistake, he contests the ticket online. A magistrate reviews the case information—the officer’s body cam video and digital notes, IoT data from the radar gun, Tom’s driving record—and decides to let Tom off with a warning. Smart city technologies offer myriad benefits in the realm of public safety. Explore real-world examples of automated court processes, improved evidence collection, digital video storage, and more.
Improve citizen and social care
The last but not least stop in your smart city exploration: improving citizen and social care. Sometimes improving citizen lives comes down to making processes that citizens rely on easier. In our virtual smart city, Cassie decides to start a consulting business. Because her city offers intelligent, automated application processes, Cassie quickly navigates her way through a business permit online, applies for a grant, and tracks the progress with the help of a chatbot through her phone—without ever standing in a long line at city hall. Beyond simplifying processes, technology can help improve social care, from tracking and measuring program success metrics to increasing accessibility to supporting service departments through connected, synchronized data.
“Bringing smart living to your city,” an interactive infographic, shows how Microsoft partners with cities to deploy cloud technologies that streamline processes, engage citizens, enhance public services, and benefit public health and safety. You and your city planning teams can explore solutions that have meaningful, positive impacts on your city and the lives of its citizens.
