Regional Areas of New South Wales to Receive Smart City Technology

Concept of a smart city (jamesteohart/ Adobe stock)

The New South Wales (NSW) government is investing $2.4 million (US$1.7 million) to bring smart city technologies to regional areas of NSW, narrowing the tech gap between those regions and urban areas.

Minister for Local Government, Wendy Tuckerman, said on Thursday that the Smart Regional Spaces: Ready, Set, Go project, which partners with two Sydney-based universities, will potentially see 91 regional councils across NSW benefit.

“This innovative partnership with regional councils, University of Sydney and UNSW (University of New South Wales) will see them connect with industry experts, empower investment in new technology and data-driven solutions to help address the substantial divide in digital inclusion between Australians living in rural and urban areas,” she said.

“Examples of smart place initiatives include smart street lighting, real-time bus schedules available on digital screens or through apps, using smart sensors to gather waste management data or smart sensors installed on parking spaces.”

This comes as part of the Smart Places Strategy, which is a plan to “integrate technologies into the built environment to capture and convey data and insights.”

The technology is designed to capture information on the local environment, and consists of sensors and communications technology embedded in infrastructure, through which data is captured, safely stored, and made available.

Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government, Victor Dominello, said a key pillar of the Smart Places Strategy is ensuring regional communities can take advantage of emerging smart technologies.

“In partnership with local councils, the Smart Places Acceleration Program continues to deliver smart technological capabilities to fix problems that people are facing every day,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture at UNSW, Prof. Claire Annesley, said the movement of the smart place can offer social, economic, and environmentally sustainable advantages to regional communities, stressing that smart technologies from cities cannot always be directly applied to regions, but rather adapted to suit the regional environment.

“Many of the ideas generated by this movement to date relate to the challenges of dense urban living that do not necessarily translate to regional spatial scales, assets and geographically dispersed communities, and why a tailored regional focus is so important,” she said.