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Residents missing link in Tangerang’s smart city idea
Tangerang municipality, Banten, has adopted a so-called “smart city” concept using technology to better serve residents, although only a small proportion of residents have signed up for the service
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span>Tangerang municipality, Banten, has adopted a so-called “smart city” concept using technology to better serve residents, although only a small proportion of residents have signed up for the service.
The city, which celebrated its 26th anniversary last month, is among the first 25 cities listed by the Information and
Communications Ministry in the first-stage implementation of “Indonesia’s Movement toward 100 Smart Cities” program launched in 2017.
Euis Nurlaila, public service app division head at Tangerang Information and Communications Agency said the city had developed 179 website-based and mobile applications as part of efforts to realize the smart city concept. All of the applications are integrated under a one-stop application called Tangerang LIVE to serve its 2.1 million residents.
LIVE resonates with Tangerang’s development concept of being a city that is “Livable, Investable, Visitable, and E-City”, introduced by Tangerang Mayor Arief R. Wismansyah during his first term in 2013 to 2018. He is currently serving his second term in office.
The agency’s media division head Mualim, explained that the concept of a one-stop application emerged in the middle of 2015, initially aimed at disseminating the city’s LIVE tagline to its residents.
“Because we did a survey back in 2015 and found that only 10 percent of residents knew about LIVE,” he said, adding that the one-stop application, as well as a command center for the Tangerang LIVE Room were launched in 2016.
Through Tangerang LIVE, people only need to install one app in their smartphone to be able to access all the city apps, including citizen-reporting, civil registry application, education services, tourism information, availability of hospital rooms and information for job seekers.
The latest app, siWarga, means residents no longer need to go back-and-forth to their neighborhood unit (RT), community unit (RW), subdistrict and district offices to get several types of documents.
By utilizing the app, residents can make an appointment with their RT and RW officials and remain informed about the progress, including notifications when the document is completed.
The Your Aspiration Box Service (LAKSA) mobile application is the second-most utilized by residents. It has received some 16,000 reports and among the problems reported the most common were related to complaints or seeking information about civil registry, as well as traffic congestion and road damage reports, Euis said.
A system called Field Officer Information System (Sigap), she added, conveyed reports to city officials and working units in the city. The reports, retrieved from LAKSA and other channels, should be addressed immediately once they are received by officials in charge of the issues. The three working units with the most contributions are the Civil Registry Agency, the Transportation Agency and the Public Works and Housing Agency.
Surprisingly, Euis added, the most visited app in Tangerang LIVE was the job employment app, which has attracted more than 120,000 visits so far.
Therefore, the administration will improve the quality of the app to provide better services for jobseekers. Tangerang recorded an unemployment rate of nearly 75,000 people, or 7.16 percent, according to 2017 data issued by Statistics Indonesia.
The one-stop app had been downloaded by a total of 53,766 users as of Friday, who need only to register their ID number prior to using the app.
Euis hoped that more Tangerang residents would install the app.
“It is designed to serve our residents but the users only account for one tenth of the 560,000 families in Tangerang,” she said. “The benefit from e-city for us is the user data, which will be the baseline for our next policies and programs.”
Tangerang has received several accolades following the implementation of the smart city concept, including “Best Smart Branding” city in the 2018 Indonesia Smart Nation Award held by the Citiasia Center for Smart Nation in cooperation with the Tourism Ministry.
Thirty nationwide-scale institutions and local governments have adopted similar technology through a program called “Tangerang Smart City Partnership”.
The partnership is free, provided the partner institution declares the copyright belongs to the Tangerang city administration, Euis said.
“We only ask them to stay at hotels in Tangerang [in return],” she said.
