The city’s development and launch of two applications – one that improves water conservation efforts and another that expedites public safety response at large scale events – landed Scottsdale a finalist designation in two categories of the 2023 International Data Corporation Smart Cities Awards.
Now, residents can help the city capture the awards by voting for the two projects through 5 p.m. (ET) Friday, March 31.
The awards recognize municipalities that best use electronic methods to make life better for residents and to attract visitors and new businesses. These cities, called Smart Cities, are embracing new technologies; the IDC supports these cities and showcases their efforts.
These are Scottsdale’s two finalists:
Smart Water Conservation Application
Scottsdale Water Conservation Office’s Smart Water Conservation Application is an automated program that identifies landscaping to enhance water conservation efforts.
Before the application’s development, the city manually merged water and land use information. The time-consuming process lacked standardization and was inconsistent. The application identifies landscaping and calculates ground cover footage, tree canopy and water surface area. This allows the city to quickly generate water budgets for large landscapes and provide guidance by phone, reducing the need for onsite inspections. This process increases accuracy of classification, shortens response time, reduces administrative processes and identifies opportunities to reduce water use.
Scottsdale GIS App for the World’s Premier Golf Event
With hundreds of thousands of visitors to the WM Phoenix Open golf tournament each February, the TPC Scottsdale becomes a city within the city. The Scottsdale GIS team and Scottsdale Police and Fire departments worked together to create a digital map application that updates every 30 seconds, showing the location and status of onsite first responders.
When seconds matter most, this allows the city to dispatch crews nearest to each incident and provides first responders advanced maps of the venue -- enabling the quickest path to those in need. The system has enabled Scottsdale’s Emergency Operations Center staff to identify areas experiencing the highest volume of activity, allocate paramedic units and track each type of emergency in real-time.
