Telecom Italia and the Italian National Association of Communes (ANCI), Italy’s association for local government authorities, are engaged in a drive to promote smart cities to Italian authorities. The two organisations are promoting and show casing smart city programmes in many of Italy’s largest cities, including Milan, Venice, Naples, Padua, Bari and Taranto.

TIM Enterprise, a Telecom Italia business unit, has an ongoing collaboration with the Municipality of Milan to develop predictive models for mobility and eco-sustainability analyses. The company is also working on an analytical model for managing of tourist flows for the Municipality of Brescia.

The TIM Urban Genius solution is a tool developed by Telecom Italia to enable development and adoption of policies to reduce the environmental impact of city development. It is based on a model already successfully implemented in several Italian municipalities, beginning with Venice.

TIM Enterprise has also launched a ‘mobility’ Digital Twin project for the City of Bari. The urban digital twin focuses on the Bari neighbourhoods of San Nicola, Murat, Madonnella and Libertà.

The TIM Enterprise urban intelligence platform allows the digital replication of an mobility system and the simulation and testing of different traffic scenarios, forecasts and interventions without any effect on the real urban environment. The project involves the use of the assets and technologies of Polo Strategico Nazionale, the new national cloud infrastructure for the Italian Public Administration, which offers solutions and services guaranteeing efficiency, security and reliability of the data.

The municipality of Taranto is using the TIM Enterprise urban intelligence system as part of its engagement in the Calliope Smart City project. The system is being used for localised monitoring, modelling and predictive analysis for the city’s sustainable and environmental urban development.

“For some years,” said Antonio Decaro, President of ANCI and Mayor of Bari, “it has been understood that, in order to aim for an “intelligent and sustainable city”, the reasoning must start from how to make the fundamental aspects of a city work better – mobility , waste management, energy efficiency, safety, social services – thanks to digital technologies. Italian cities are doing their part, carrying out interventions that can be considered as peaks of innovation. To design and implement interventions with a high rate of innovation, it becomes crucial to find a balance between the need for strong public management and the opportunities offered by forms of partnership with the private sector: from this point of view, the relationship established with TIM is producing results positive and will certainly give others in the future.”

According to estimates by Telecom Italia researchers, by 2027 investments in ICT solutions for smart cities will grow to around 1.6 billion euros, while at a global level the total spending in Smart Cities will reach a value of over 1,000 billion of dollars. In the period ’23-’27, Smart City applications based on 5G, IoT and Artificial Intelligence in Italy are set to contribute to reducing overall city traffic costs by approximately 6.5 billion euros and costs of over 400 million euros linked to urban pollution thanks to better planning of public and private transport and tourist flows. The new technologies will also allow an annual reduction of approximately 650 thousand tonnes of CO2 emissions.