Local governments face a familiar challenge of needing to balance tight budgets and rate pressures, with rising community expectations for reliable infrastructure and rapid service delivery. In response, forward-thinking councils are turning to smart city technologies to optimise public assets, streamline maintenance, and improve resource allocation.
At its core, a "smart city" is not about futuristic gimmicks or technology for its own sake. A smart city integrates connected digital technologies, such as sensors and data networks into physical public infrastructure to be more efficient, sustainable and liveable. By equipping assets like drainage networks, bins, vehicles, buildings, and public lighting with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, councils can gather granular, real-time spatial data. This informs capital works planning, asset life-cycle management, predictive maintenance schedules, and resource allocation, which in turn helps infrastructure work smarter for both residents and businesses.
Globally, several European cities have demonstrated the long-term dividends of early smart technology investments. Over a decade ago, Barcelona City Council deployed a comprehensive network of IoT sensors, including dynamic smart streetlighting, real-time soil moisture sensors in public parks, and fill-level sensors in municipal waste containers. Through these initiatives, they achieved a 25% decrease in park water use, saving approximately €425,000 annually, and a 30% reduction in energy use across their lighting network.
Equally, Zurich has been ranked number one on the International Institute for Management Development’s Smart City Index for seven consecutive years. A pioneer in smart city innovation, Zurich has deployed dynamic streetlighting to reduce energy consumption, integrated public transport systems onto a single cohesive digital platform, and used real-time sensor data to improve traffic flow, waste management, and public services.
Closer to home, local councils in Victoria are also leading the way in smart city innovation. At the City of Stonnington, their smart city journey began in 2020 with targeted pilot projects and a dedicated Smart City team. The initial pilot deployed IoT sensors to monitor pedestrian and vehicle movement, air quality sensing, smart lighting controllers, followed by RFID-enabled waste management tags, drainage pits sensors, and solar power monitors.
Goran Babušku, Smart City Lead at the City of Stonnington says: “Smart city technology is fundamentally about solving real operational challenges. You don't need a multi-million-dollar transformation from day one. You can start small, engage with staff and communities, target specific pain points, prove the value, and scale from there.”
The response to these early pilots was positive. It has provided ongoing data to inform teams on traffic across the key activity precincts, drove more data-driven decision-making across Council, with real-time sensor data alerting maintenance teams precisely when and where interventions are needed. This approach significantly reduced unnecessary staff travel, curbed fuel expenditures, and accelerated response times for community service requests.
In a recent project to revitalise the Gardiners Creek corridor, the City of Stonnington embedded the emerging technologies into the construction design, including motion-detected adaptive lighting, and a purpose-built IoT observation station that will include water quality and flood monitoring. This setup allows for automated fault reporting and data-informed maintenance, while opening opportunities for future data-sharing partnerships with other authorities.
Smart lighting Gardiners Creek corridor.
Similarly, the City of Casey – one of Victoria’s fastest growing local government areas – is working to embed smart technologies across its asset portfolio. Given its expanding population, Casey’s smart city team is focussed on optimising asset management and maximising community value through real-time operational data.
Smart City Project Officer at the City of Casey, Chris Williams, says: “With rates capped and demand for infrastructure surging, every dollar must go further. Using IoT sensors across our community assets gives us unprecedented visibility over how facility infrastructure is utilised, allowing us to make evidence-based capital allocation decisions.”
For Casey, the first smart city project involved deploying IoT sensors to count pedestrians in the main streets of Narre Warren, Berwick, and Cranbourne during COVID-19. This data was published online so that local businesses could access that information and understand how footpath behaviours changed during that period.
Chris states: “During this unpredictable time, local businesses could see how customer movements were changing. That helped them make better decisions around staffing, opening hours and day-to-day operations.”
Through sensor-enabled monitoring, the team at Casey tracks utilisation rates across sports stadiums, parks, and community centres, ensuring public works teams prioritise maintenance and expansion where needed most.
At Casey Fields, a 70-hectare multi-sports complex which is home to one of Melbourne’s professional AFL/AFLW clubs, the City monitors the field with cameras as the team trains to understand which sections of the field are getting more or less use.
Heat map at Casey Fields showing grass use.
Chris says “Monitoring the field empowers us to pre-emptively look at sections of the grass that might be suffering too much damage, and we can do localised repairs. Or we can ask the club to shift their training to another area of the pitch so that we can recondition the grass in an area that might be deteriorating. Maintaining this pitch to a professional grade is a costly exercise, so even modest margins of savings add up to meaningful amounts that can be channelled towards another community program.”
As we look toward the future of smart cities, public perception, citizen satisfaction, and community trust is as important as the technology itself. As Zurich’s long-standing leadership shows, smart cities win over residents when digital tools are used transparently to solve everyday problems and safeguard public funds.
For Australian councils facing tight fiscal constraints, the experiences of Stonnington and Casey demonstrate organisations can start with small projects that target specific operational pain points. By sharing clear data outcomes with the community, local governments can build both operational efficiency and long-term civic trust, which helps ensure public infrastructure works harder and smarter for its community.
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