Arima's first step towards becoming smart city

BitDepth#1479

Mark Lyndersay

CONNECTED Arima, a project to transform the borough of Arima using technology into the country's first smart city, is an eminently good idea.

It's a sensible approach to creating a locally relevant smart city. Pick one location with a mix of local features and challenges, deploy technology to meet citizen needs, and learn from the experience before moving on to other city centres.

Arima is a good mix of urban occupation, dense business centre, agriculture on the fringes and an engaged, social population.

After seeing a press release showing workers dragging cable for the project, I reached out to Carina Cockburn, then country manager for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), for an update on the project and to do a ground tour of the work under way.

An indirect response to that request came on September 27 for a launch event carded for the next day.

I've almost completely lost my taste for in-person events that cater to ego over information, but the invite specifically asked attendees to wear comfortable shoes for a city tour that would run for 90 minutes from 10 am.

This was exactly what I'd been asking for, but unfortunately, that's not quite what happened.

There's a version of this column where I go on for five paragraphs about everything that went wrong with this launch, but that was just annoyance at how I spent six hours on a hot, busy Saturday.

The launch was mostly speeches from government ministers that were short on digital comprehension and long on self-congratulation. The Ministry of Digitalisation? Really? From a member of Cabinet?

The overall Arima smart-town project is a collaboration of several government ministries, supported by the IDB, which provided 90 per cent of the US$500 million loan budgeted for the project (sourced from the Korean Poverty Reduction Fund), with the State responsible for "in-kind" investment of the rest.

The Urban Upgrading and Revitalisation Programme is funded by an IDB loan of US$32.5 million, of which US$15.5 million is allocated to the urban revitalisation component, which includes Connected Arima.

When I asked Devindra Rampersad of the Digital Transformation Ministry why the project took three years to launch, he immediately pointed to the Planning Minister, who's evidently the lead on the project.

According to the IDB, the project went through the following phases since the 2021 announcement:

• Institutional development in the creation and structuring of the Ministry of Digital Transformation, a key partner.
• Public consultations to understand the perspectives and needs of key stakeholders.
• Diagnostic studies focused on socio-economic dynamics; mobility, digital connectivity leading to an urban regeneration plan for downtown Arima that is currently being finalised with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.
• A pilot digital connectivity implementation at the Arima General Hospital in 2023.

"Public WiFi was a highly desired feature of a regenerated downtown in the views of the public at large as measured in a 2022 SMS survey financed by the IDB," the bank said in response to questions.

"The anticipation is that it will attract more persons to the downtown and lengthen the time spent there by visitors. This is likely to positively impact patronage of downtown businesses."

The public WiFi was officially activated on September 28 at the hospital, and it's fast. A local ping registered 250 megabits of download speed and 126 for upload. A ping to a Caribbean server delivered 43.6 Mbps for download and 160 for upload.

That's a reading close to the system backbone, which is hosted in the hospital's server room on a network that had no load, but it's a respectable speed profile for the Amplia-powered installation.

The roll-out of the project will be in three phases, the first of which encircles Royal Princes Park, the green space at the centre of Arima proper which includes the Velodrome, sporting facilities and other social centres before continuing to the east.

"The service is not free. It is public, and it is being paid for by stakeholders in the borough, most notably the borough corporation and the Arima General Hospital. The route is linked to a few streets and has not entered the residential or industrial parts of Arima; so there is little risk of adversely affecting existing service providers. The business community continues to keep their contracts with their normal providers in their shops. Minimising such conflicts is part of the design."

The future of the project includes the establishment of "smart poles" which will carry surveillance cameras and wireless charging along with socially relevant features like an emergency call button and solar-powered lighting. There are plans for surveillance cameras along O'Meara Road.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there.