Two Swiss cities have expanded their smart city ambitions. The City of Winterthur in the country’s north is adopting sensors, drones and AI to improve maintainance of green spaces and city administration. The City of Thun in country’s west is formally adopting Smart City status, after a number of successful projects implementing Smart City technologies.

The City of Winterthur in the Canton of Zurich is planning to implement three Smart City projects in 2024, comprising AI in city administration, using drones, sensors and AI to maintain green spaces, and adopting Generative AI to support city administrative workers.

The City of Thun in the Canton of Bern has published a Smart City mission statement.After implementing a number of Smart City technology projects, Thun has formally adopted the goal of becoming a Smart City and has set out a roadmap for achieving its goals.

Winterthur’s “Smart Green Spaces” project aims to examine how the maintenance of urban green spaces could be improved using sensors, drones and artificial intelligence. If the project is successful, the green areas would be able to report themselves when they need water and fertilizer.

The “Generative AI Assistance” project is designed to lay the foundation for the use of artificial intelligence in city administration. The goal is a pilot application that will relieve employees of tasks such as researching or taking notes.

With its project “Dashboard ‘On the pulse of Winti’”, the Office for Urban Development wants to process urban data sets in a low-threshold manner using new visualizations and present them publicly in the Superblock.

Thun City Council has approved a mission statement setting out “smart” projects, guiding principles and measures planned to achieve future Smart City status.

In recent years, numerous projects have already been implemented that correspond to the principles of a smart city: including a city app with damage detector, a pilot for e-charging stations on public land and drone-assisted green space maintenance.

“We want to further advance human-centred digitalization,” city councillor Andrea de Meuron says in a statement issued by the council. With a digitalization strategy adopted in 2022, the city has a foundation for development. The new “Smart City” mission statement is designed to complement the digitalization strategy and aims at broader goals.