As Port Elizabeth's Baywest City Mall links up with Vodacom in a partnership to light a high-speed fibre-optic network in the area, the planned commercial, retail and residential area adds to a growing amount of smart city projects under way across SA.
Numerous other cities are also busy with individual projects in the build-up to their vision of connected, more efficient operations for municipalities and citizens.
Johannesburg, Tshwane, Cape Town and Durban have all targeted increased engagement through e-services, and investments across the cities aim to engage more aspects of citizen life.
More than R150 million has been injected into integrating technology and sustainability for education, transport and sport in Cape Town, while other major cities have been building on e-service offerings.
The Baywest Mall project focuses on commercial development in its view towards a smarter city. Gavin Blows, MD of the mall, says getting business buy-in will be integral to the success of the network and planned infrastructure. He says once the network is installed, businesses will be able to make free calls within the area, and enjoy "reduced call rates, easy cloud computing, and live gaming without any lag".
Electronic moves
SA's major economic hubs have numerous projects under way as they work towards envisioned smart city status:
Cape Town
* E-services for citizen interactions with the municipality.
* Wallacedene taxi rank that generates its own power.
* Enabling mobile Encyclopaedia Britannica access in the city's libraries.
* Gunshot-detecting technology to combat violent crime.
* Sustainable synthetic turfs for sport and recreation
Johannesburg
* E-services.
* Electricity smart meter installations.
* Find & Fix app for reporting road-related problems.
Tshwane
* e-Tshwane project for e-services.
* Smart meter installations.
* WiFi hubs for increased connectivity and access to educational content.
Durban
* E-services online and integrated into a new app.
* IBM Smarter City grant to collaborate with the tech company in realising the city's innovation goals.
Private-public partnerships
Mark Walker, the International Data Corporation's (IDC's) regional director for Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Turkey, says SA can tap into more partnerships to enable smarter cities, as other regions have done. "Dubai's Internet City is a successful example of how collaboration with the private sector can help progress. It had huge political and government backing and they made it attractive for big tech companies to invest in it."
Kenya is also making inroads in pushing towards smart city development and technology innovation, according to Walker. "South Africa was, for a long time, the most attractive destination and - even though this economy is still bigger than Kenya's - they outfox us from a technology innovation point of view," he says.
The country aims to create one of the continent's leading technology hubs through an investment of more than $500 million (R5.4 billion). The Kenyan government has noted Konza Technology City will boost the country's education, life sciences, telecoms and IT outsourcing sectors.
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