Tucson and Tempe recognized for global smart cities project

PHOENIX – Two Arizona city projects were recognized in the 2021 Smart 50 Awards for their innovative work.

The Innovation in Advancing Community Health and Fighting COVID-19 project based in Tempe and Project Aelous based in Tucson were honored for their transformative city projects, presented by Smart Cities Connect.

The City of Tempe worked with scientists from Arizona State University to study the city’s wastewater in an effort reduce the spread of COVID-19 and advance community health.

Tempe was able to focus on neighborhoods and businesses in the area with prevention education and outreach, multilingual communication and messaging, mask distribution to households and COVID-19 saliva-based testing.

The project has been praised for how it deployed the city’s limited resources.

Project Aeolus in Tucson is a municipal wireless project that aims to provide in-home internet access to underserved and unserved families with children who have transitioned to remote learning during the pandemic.

This project aims to positively impact families without internet access and with children in the house that rely on remote learning.

Tucson will have the largest LTE government-owned network in the country, according to the project.

With the growing possibility of more smart city opportunities, Tucson can use the technology to address air pollution, flood detection, forest fire detection, accident detection, water quality, noise monitoring.

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