Kiev, Ukraine – Population 3 million. The city and country have begun a rebuilding process following an era of corruption and conflict with their Russian neighbors. It is an important center for science, industry, education and culture in Eastern Europe.
Recently, it hosted the annual Eurovision competition and its mayor is the former boxing heavyweight champion of the world, Vitali Klitschko. This is the setting for their groundbreaking Smart City project – revolutionizing citizen participation and ushering the city into a new era of democratic institutionalization.
One of the pillars of the project is having more transparency with citizens, which means allowing them to get more involved in city projects. Participatory Budget is a solution that the city of Kiev has been introduced to as a solution to this. Its main purpose is to give the citizens to understand the democratic process and give them control increasing the city’s budget for things like health, education, and housing. This project runs in stages. Firstly, analyze the status of the budget being implemented with expenditure and income. Secondly, detail the receipts of cash expenditures, financial commitments, and balances in public facilities. Thirdly, analyze payments to see if there are any discrepancies in the city’s financial commitments it has made. The final phase is a public debate over the final budget which citizens can cast a vote on. Thus, civil society can influence the decision-making process of the future use of the city’s budget.
Code Academy plans to give free education in IT and the basics of coding. IT-specialists teach this new revolutionary format from top companies in the country. The test semester has shown that children are not only interested in coding but have quickly adopted the new information taught to them. In the last several years, the IT sector in Kiev has been growing in demand and in annual wages. It has become extremely important today to teach children the most practical skills in IT in order to lead them deep into the 21st-century technology field.
Those are just two sections of the project. Melnykova Smart Street is a development scheme in the field of urban infrastructure for the city.
Source: http://www.kyivsmartcity.com/
Hospital Without Queues is a system that monitors the activity of a patient in which doctors can care for them through mobile applications, thus cutting waiting time for others. OpenWorld helps the blind who need assistance, Smart Roads alerts others where there are accidents and heavy traffic, and Animal-id is an online platform that registers pets in the city and controls the population.
Source:www.kyivsmartcity.com
Kiev continues to be Ukraine’s largest and richest city, thanks to their infrastructure and continuous growth in tighter relations with the European Union, Kiev is a growing hub of influence in Eastern Europe. The main goal of the hub is to inspire leaders and create changes in the city. These changes would give the most opportunities for leaders to make their projects a reality, contributing to the development of Kiev and the Ukraine as a whole.