Big data viewed as strategic foundation for smart city development

Preliminary statistics indicate that as of December, 2023, the country had 902 urban areas with an urbanisation rate of about 42.7%, on a par with the rest of Asia's urbanisation rate.

The urban economy makes up about 70% of the country's GDP. A major problem is how to find new development drivers amid the constant fluctuations of the economy, society, and technology.

Smart cities represent one of the major development trends of cities around the world. As one of the nations that is leading in this field, Vietnam is making many positive changes in terms of policies, the local investment environment, research, implementation, and practical applications in both provinces and cities.

To date, 48 out of 63 provinces and cities nationwide have carried out smart urban projects.

Hanoi, one of the provinces and cities that is drastically implementing the smart urban project, has recorded a string of tremendous achievements, such as being ready for 5G infrastructure with 12,000 base transceiver stations (BTS) and fiber optic cables to 100% of households.

The iHanoi application boasts 1.6 million accounts, whilst 5.4 million health records have been connected to the National Database and the hospital system and traffic tickets have also been deployed.

Sharing information at a recent conference on smart city development, Ha Minh Hai, vice chairman of the Hanoi People's Committee, stated that iHanoi can be considered as one of the typical examples in developing smart cities. The application has had about 16 million interactions since mid-2024 and recorded more than 21,000 recommendations. One key benefit is that residents are able to make recommendations in real time on the system.

Highlighting an overview of the smart Hanoi city building project by 2025, with a vision towards 2030, Nguyen Viet Hung, director of the Hanoi Department of Information and Communications, said that the capital is developing in harmony towards a cultural, civilized, green, smart, and modern city.

In particular, Hanoi prioritises investment in three areas, namely urban transport; conservation and development of heritage, culture, and tourism; and the protection of the water and air environment.

The capital also issued a data strategy which puts people and businesses as the center; data as a new resource, while creating new values ​​to promote socio-economic development; and building an administration that proactively interacts with people and businesses.

Regarding its data strategy until 2030, Hung affirmed that data will open up new development space for digital government, the digital economy, and digital society as a whole, while becoming a core resource to spur forward Hanoi's development into a smart and modern city, firmly entering a new phase which will be the era of the nation’s rise.

“Data is a factor that drives economic growth and enhances the city’s competitiveness. Not only that, data is also the foundation to ensure the goal of building Hanoi into a smart, advanced, globally connected city, meeting the requirements of sustainable development, strengthening management and promoting prosperity for the capital in the long term,” Hung emphasised.

To realise the data strategy, Hanoi has opened a data enter at Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park with a public-private partnership approach, using cloud computing services to both increase efficiency and optimise investment costs. This is the first city Data Center in the country to apply this model.

Gradually fine-tuned institutions for building smart cities

According to many experts, the nation needs to continue to take advantage of opportunities from Industry 4.0 to implement the goal of smart cities and move towards sustainable development to elevate the country's position in the region.

A young population coupled with high internet usage are seen as favourable conditions for technology development. However, the collection and processing of large amounts of data requires comprehensive cybersecurity solutions.

Tran Ngoc Linh, an expert of the Department of Urban Development under the Ministry of Construction, said that in addition to issues such as institutions, capital, and digital infrastructure, digital data remains one of the problems that must be solved in building smart cities.

Currently issues such as lacking and redundant data, difficult data exploitation, and sub-standard data connection with low accuracy are seen as big problems. Therefore, information models and data strategies also need to be invested in more systematically. This is an urgent task in the coming time for provinces and cities before deploying solutions for analysis, supporting management, and operations, as well as further exploiting data to create new socio-economic values, Linh pointed out.

On December 16, the Ministry of Construction issued guidelines for applying the smart sustainable urban criteria version 1.0.

Accordingly, the criteria is built on the pillars of smart urban development, including smart urban planning; smart urban construction and management; along with providing smart urban utilities for organisations and individuals in the urban area with the foundation being the urban technical infrastructure system, the information technology infrastructure system with a smart urban spatial database that is interconnected, and being integrated with the two systems above.

When assessing the level of smart urban maturity, the city is required to complete at least 75% of the prescribed criteria corresponding to the assessed level.

Organisations and individuals with qualifications and a capacity for smart city recognition and assessment are responsible for specifying the criteria and are responsible for the assessment results.

Technologies, products, services, models, digital solutions, connectivity, integration, sharing, and data exploitation serving the construction and development of smart cities and smart urban utilities must therefore ensure network security and network information security according to relevant legal regulations.

Instructions for applying the Criteria Set are applied on a trial basis until December 31, 2026.