IDC Asia/Pacific recently announced the 19 winners for this year’s IDC Smart City Asia/Pacific Awards (SCAPA). Now in their sixth year, SCAPA 2020 saw the winners spread throughout Asia/Pacific: Taiwan with four, China and Singapore with three, South Korea and Australia with two, and one each from India, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, and New Zealand.

The City of Perth won the Civic Engagement category for the Perth Smart Cities Collaboration project. Combining several small projects through a Collaboration Market Place platform, this project aims to enable the exchange of ideas and data among citizens and interest groups in order to evolve and scale technologies through a range of solutions, with the final goal of improving liveability, sustainability and workability in the city of Perth.

This set of small projects included smart irrigation (e.g. 107 smart irrigation devices support water, energy savings and operational efficiencies); video analytics through CCTV camera analytics to support decisions; a smart lighting trial; a sustainability dashboard with solutions and technologies that include an Open Data Portal, Public LoRa WAN and Citizen Science, which promotes the participation of schools and universities.

Byron Bay, Bendigo, Ku-ring-gai, Waverly, Banyule, Canterbury, Bankstown, Northern Beaches of Sydney, Manningham, and Towong Councils shared the Sustainable Infrastructure award for the Energy Data for Smart Decision-Making project.

This collaborative project consists of the development of an open modelling platform that uses spatial data and data on solar exposure, energy generation and consumption to help end users calculate the solar power potential of areas of interest. Users are then enabled with information to make informed decisions on investments in solar power generation. The project integrates an interactive map of Australia that uses solar potential and energy time-series data, along with transparent open-source models that analyse potential solar energy in specific areas. This information supports councils and end users in making decisions about investment in solar panels and precinct scales and allows councils to design policies and incentives with statistical analysis of energy technologies.

Tehmasp Parekh, Managing Director of IDC Australia and New Zealand, says given the competition that Australian projects are up against across the Asia Pacific region, the results are especially impressive.

"For Australia to have two projects that stand out on the regional stage is a noteworthy achievement. Australian organisations, by taking advantage of unprecedented pace of technological progress, have consistently excelled in the six years that these awards have been running. The efforts of such organisations in making cities more liveable and sustainable and prosperous are even more relevant under the current challenges facing our world.”

A full list of the Asia/Pacific winners of the 2020 IDC Smart City Asia/Pacific Awards can be found here.