The fifth largest city in Croatia and the second largest in Dalmatia, as well as one of the most significant and developed tourist centers in Croatia – the City of Zadar – was the first in Croatia to start implementing something that almost every city has today, namely a ‘smart city’ application for real-time traffic monitoring. As part of the technological modernization of Zadar’s public transport, the mobile application Zadar Smart City was launched in February last year, the first of its kind in Croatia. This application will soon be supplemented with a city and tourist card, in the form of a classic or virtual card.
– The ultimate goal is for Zadar Smart City to become a unique access point to most of the essential services that citizens and tourists need at the level of the City of Zadar, from necessary information, access to various services to the ability to pay for services using all payment methods – says Ante Ćurković, head of the Mayor’s Office.
This is one of many smart projects implemented by the City of Zadar over the past years, along with, for example, the digitization of public administration and the management of public lighting, traffic, and waste using Internet of Things technology. The foundation for this is the city’s ICT infrastructure with about 75 kilometers of its own optical network connecting 115 city locations: city institutions, utility companies, establishments, schools, city server rooms, or city ‘cluster’ servers, WiFi and IoT access points, cameras…
A step towards a virtual city
Additionally, Zadar has its own geographic information system (GIS), and by the end of the year, all the most important and commonly used digitized services of the City Administration will be fully integrated on the eZadrani platform.
– This refers to all requests that users submit to the city administration, allowing the citizens of Zadar to complete public services provided by the local government from their armchairs. Besides insight into the resolution of cases, citizens regularly use this platform for subsidizing kindergarten costs and obtaining rights to compensation for newborns, scholarships for students, and requests for permits for vehicle entry into pedestrian zones. The city also has a portal listing the assets of the City of Zadar in tabular form by various categories, and based on the GIS system, the creation of a map of public areas that are leased is being completed. This introduces more efficient control of the use of leased areas and allows every citizen to view these areas with all relevant data – says Ćurković, adding that this way they aim to approach the set goal of a ‘virtual city’.
