DANICA RIDLEY
Cape Town SMART CITY
2019
For this student assignment, I was required to choose a South African city, revamp and rebrand its visual identity, and come up with a strategic direction to launch the city as a smart city.
The insights from my research lead me in the direction of employing Cape Town as a tourism smart city as tourism plays a major role in this city. Cape town is a city fill with history, culture and landmarks which influence the influx of tourists every year, and keep cape town standing as one of Africa’s top tourism and business cities. These specific insights motivated my decision to utilize something that was already working for this city, but making it better and using it as a launch pad for greater things to come down the line, such as other improvements to the city. The revamped visual identity of the city is one that is inspired by all things that make Cape Town the amazing city that it is. It is a more modern approach to match with the personality of Cape Town’s citizens. It aims to be fun, bold, bright and upbeat.
My ultimate aim for recreating cape town as a smart city is to give the city a fresh rebranding to launch it as a tourism smart city which will then boost economic activity, bring in revenue and bring us one step closer to reaching the 2030 sustainable development goals. Tourism is one of Cape Town’s most successful sectors and brings in great amounts of revenue and creates many jobs. Cape Town is a place filled with history, culture and amazing landmarks which is what draws people to this magnificent city. Cape Town will use this as a stepping stone to launching the everlasting smart city and this implementation of the smart tourism sector will lead to major improvements to infrastructure, travel, way of living and more down the line.
The city will be launching a new city app which will serve as a hub for all things Cape Town. This will be available for citizen to download and there whey will find cape town info, visual identity explanation, tourism spots, a city map and a contact page. Citizens will also be able to interact with new electronic information boards found around the city. These boards will give general information about areas of interest, tourism spots, city services, contact, and a QR code which will take them straight to the app download page for better convenience on the go, when an individual needs city information.
