Smart Cities are gaining traction in Latin America, where governments are investing to improve the use of resources and quality of life in the region’s burgeoning urban centers. Latin America counts several densely populated megacities of ten million-plus inhabitants, and city managers struggle to steer urban growth, keep pace with citizen’s needs, and mitigate the environmental impact.
The Latin America cities deploying the greatest numbers of Smart Cities applications include Santiago in Chile, Buenos Aires in Argentina, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Bogotá and Medellín in Colombia, Mexico City in Mexico, which are piloting and scaling up solutions to enhance urban mobility, public security, energy distribution and utility management, as well as healthcare and housing services.
But smart technologies are not a sole prerogative of megacities. Even medium-sized communities are taking advantage of Internet of Things and digitalization to become more efficient while providing better services to residents and visitors. In Las Condes, Chile, the major and the city council are committed to constantly improve public governance and services for the benefit of the entire community, always taking care of citizens’ wellbeing and satisfaction.
Las Condes began its Smart City journey in 2018 by replacing most of the streetlights with energy-efficient LED lamps and implementing a wireless IoT network to manage and control public applications. Based on our Smart Urban Network, the cybersecure 6LoWPAN infrastructure currently enables key applications such as streetlighting, parking management, traffic surveillance, environmental monitoring, and more.
Interoperability springs up among the critical success factors of Smart City projects such as Las Condes. What is it about? Interoperability ensures that technology products and services – even from different vendors – can interact, exchange information, and work together seamlessly. Interoperability has many benefits for cities, including product commoditization with lower acquisition and management costs. But it is mainly a powerful innovation engine, since it drives future-proof projects where new applications can be added over time without concerns, minimizing obsolescence risks and integration costs.
We will discuss the benefits of interoperability and standard-based technologies for Latin America cities at Smart City Expo Bogotà, the trade fair taking place at Corferias Bogotá, Colombia from May 31 to June 2, 2023: join MinebeaMitsumi and our partner CELSA to learn more about our technologies and how they support smart projects for streetlighting, parking management, solid waste collection, environmental monitoring, and many more.