This way, about 4500 homes and at least 50 companies will benefit from the platform for the development of Smart City solutions and around 800 people who will be trained in the Smart City thematic area.

Temuco will be the first Smart City in Chile and an example for other cities in this Region. Last week, the Multilateral Investment Fund (FOMIN) of the Inter-American Development Bank (BID) group, the Universidad de La Frontera, the Municipality of Temuco, the Product Development Corporation (CORFO) and the multinational firm Everis came together in order to initiate the project that seeks (through technology) to improve the quality of life in the city and that requires an amount of US$ 3.347.669.

At the signing of the agreement in Mendoza, Argentina, the mayor of Temuco, Miguel Becker, the Rector of the University, Sergio Bravo, and the dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Science, Dr. Rodrigo Navia, who will be in charge of leading the implementation of this important program, were present. The implementation period will take three years and is about deploying an open Smart City and pilot platform in the fields of transportation, recycling and environmental decontamination, among other key areas for the development of the capital city of the Araukania Region.

“The impact of the climate change and the high urban concentration present a series of challenges for the cities. At the Universidad de La Frontera we know the challenges of Temuco and our Region and we are convinced that it is possible to improve the people´s quality of life through innovation in technology, human resources and an associative model in which we all work with the same aim: to improve our city for current and future generations”, the Rector of the University, Sergio Bravo, said.

Once the pilot platform of the city is implemented, the platform will become property of the Inter-American Development Bank who will boost its transfer and implementation in other Latin-American and Caribbean medium-sized cities (77 cities of the Emerging and Sustainable Cities Program (ESC)). At the same time, this will permit local SMEs to expand the international application that will be developed for Temuco, and all cities the BID decides to implement the platform, what creates unexpected and unprecedented business opportunities for the local ecosystem.

This way, about 4500 homes and at least 50 companies will benefit from the platform for the development of Smart City solutions and around 800 people who will be trained in the Smart City thematic area.

WHY TEMUCO?

The city of Temuco has been selected because it is part of the region with the highest poverty rates in the country (23.6% compared to the national average of 11.4%) and the highest concentration of indigenous people (more than 30% of the population, vs. 8% at the national level). The community has a population of about 232 528 people, of which 94.8% is urban.

Apart from that, it has a well-developed ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship. The city counts with about 50 thousand higher education students and stands out with the existence of the Business Incubator of the Universidad de La Frontera which is catalogued by the Product Development Corporation (CORFO) among the incubators with the highest performance in the country. They also put an emphasis on the public and private investment project Hub Digital Temuco of Everis NTT Data, a branch of the hedge-fund DevLabs (USA), who provide financial support for the development of Startup technologies at the early stage.
Temuco also has a similar size to most of the medium-sized cities in Latin-America, what makes it ideal to test solutions that can be imitated all over the Region.

SMART CITY

The Smart City Temuco initiative includes four components:

Component I (first and second year): Development and Deployment of Open Smart City and Pilot Platform. Development of a Smart City software platform open for any developer and/or service provider. Deployment of four pilot applications in order to decrease urban incidents and which consider intelligent recycling, augmented reality locations, and a real-time contamination IoT network.

Component II (second and third year): Management of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship based on technologies on secondary and university education level and SME technologies as providers of new solutions that are developed on this platform. It considers an application development program for SMEs and a program to attract international entrepreneurs; challenges of local innovation and entrepreneurship competitions for secondary and university education.

Component III (second and third year): Training of Human Capital. Strengthen regional human capital oriented to software and ICT services development at the international level and with focus on technology transfer over the Platform. It considers the implementation of an advanced Smart City training, training courses for secondary education students, and an elective specialization class for UFRO students.

Component IV (third year): Expansion. This component includes the systematization of technical requirements and the replicable business model for other medium-sized Latin-American and Caribbean cities (between 100 thousand and 2 million inhabitants).