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Culture, heritage, and a unique national drink. The Mexican town of Tequila has already captured the world’s attention. But now it’s about to become famous for a completely different reason: the town is going digital. By 2040, it doesn’t just want to be a smart town, it wants to be a Smart City.
Despite the town having a great industrial history and attracting UNESCO heritage status, opportunities for growth were limited. This resulted in problems with employment, migration and the disintegration of families.
To help create more jobs and more opportunities, the town’s leaders decided to ramp up the tourism potential around the world-renowned drink. “We’ve done a 180-degree turn and changed the town’s vocation: 15 years ago, around 450 people were employed in tourism, today it’s more than 5,000,” reveals Federico de Arteaga, planning director at Grupo JB. The number of tourists visiting the town, which has a population of just 40,000 people, is expected to hit 1.4 million in 2020 compared with just 131,000 in 2005.
To make the most of the tourism potential, Tequila wants to improve the facilities available to both visitors and citizens, and to help local businesses serve them better. “It’s very important that we understand how well our town is functioning 24/7,” explains José Alfonso Magallanes, municipal president of Tequila. “We want to provide the best in connectivity, accessibility and mobility, and we want everyone that visits Tequila to leave with a smile.”
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To achieve its Smart City ambitions, Tequila has partnered with government organisations and technology providers like Hitachi, as well as local companies and community groups. “We want to make Tequila better than it already is by enabling technological, educational and social change,” explains de Arteaga, who is spearheading the Smart City initiative. “Hitachi immediately understood our vision and the challenges we faced around data integration and scale.”
Tequila is using a number of Hitachi solutions, including Lumada Video Insights and Hitachi Smart Spaces, including Hitachi Video Analytics (HVA). HVA modules, such as Traffic Analyzer, Parking Space Analyzer, People Counter and Intrusion Detector, along with social media analytics, allow the city to combine and analyse data from past and present, to take smarter actions and improve management. “With support from Hitachi, we can leverage the power of big data in a strategic way,” says de Arteaga.
They have invested in an intelligent system for managing the overall tourism experience. Today, they have 15 working cameras, APs and sensors that have been positioned around the town to capture data on people and traffic volumes as well…
The project was scoped out using feedback from tourists, citizens, and local businesses.
