The City Government of Jayapura will be collaborating with the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) for the development of its city into a smart city.
According to the recent announcement made, the collaboration was became official with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that was done by the Deputy Mayor of Jayapura and the Vice-Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Partnership of the University.
Jayapura City is in need of development in terms of technology and the willingness that the University showed in cooperating for its establishment received gratitude from the Deputy Mayor.
The smart city implementation that they will carry out on Jayapura is considered a first for the city.
Jayapura or Kota Jayapura is a small city with an area of 935.9 KM. The capital of Papua Province has five districts or sub-districts having 25 villages with 15 different tribes or customs.
It is situated in eastern Indonesia, on the northern coast of the island of New Guinea. The city borders Jayapura Regency to the west, Keerom Regency to the south, the nation of Papua New Guinea to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the north.
To successfully convert Jayapura into a smart city, a study must first be done to survey the city’s cultural and infrastructure conditions.
However, there may be several factors that can hinder the implementation of the smart city initiative. These factors include lack of human resources and infrastructures; areas having no signals or called blank spots; and the difficulty of introducing new things to the local tribes.
This collaboration may hopefully be a good first step in the transformation of Jayapura into a smart city.
Being a smart city is a designation given to a city that incorporates information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance the quality and performance of urban services such as energy, transportation and utilities in order to reduce resource consumption, wastage and overall costs.
The University is honoured with the trust given to them in carrying out the smart city development.
Although the definition states that a city is a smart city because of its incorporation of ICT, technology is not the only aspect that needs attention in a smart city transformation. It should also cover the environmental and the social aspects.
The team will take all of these into account when formulating their smart city strategy.