BAHAM; Smarter Tehran Together
BAHAM, intends to engage citizens in governing the city. It uses a combination of conventional and modern tools to gather locals’ viewpoints in designing and implementation of urban projects and improve the citizens’ quality of life. The project has been implemented to enable citizens, vote for projects and their priority, and report their neighborhood issues to the municipality. Such a platform is a necessity for a city like Tehran with 10M population.
Regarding the strategic visin of the City Council of Tehran for urban development, this project is one of the main parts of the Smart Tehran Program (STP). So, it is a continuous approach, supported by “neighborhood development plans” (NDPs) which are already prepared for 170 neighborhoods and the process is going on for the other 183 ones.
BAHAM was recently launched to enhance transparency, citizens’ engagement and publicize municipalities’ projects and actions in local communities. The project scope is the whole city of Tehran. It has also been added to the “MyTehran” app, where all citizens regardless of their age, gender, and other characteristics, living in each of the 353 neighborhoods in Tehran, can access the project list, associated with their neighborhood and vote for those that think is best suited to them.
BAHAM was recently launched to enhance transparency, citizens’ engagement and publicize municipalities’ projects and actions in local communities. The project scope is the whole city of Tehran. It has also been added to the “MyTehran” app, where all citizens regardless of their age, gender, and other characteristics, living in each of the 353 neighborhoods in Tehran, can access the project list, associated with their neighborhood and vote for those that think is best suited to them.
Details, such as the project budget, scheduling, progress, and technical information are also provided. So, citizens can participate in the selection and prioritization of the projects as well as rating them. Next, citizens can also participate actively in projects by paying their municipal taxes such as property and waste taxes, to any of the projects directly. Much other information about each neighborhood such as its map, number of residential buildings, green spaces, accessibility to public transportation, and population, is also available.
The project peruses the following strategic objectives:
· Enhancing citizen engagement
· Increasing citizens’ satisfaction and quality of life
· Improving equity and social justice
· Decision-making based on citizens’ needs and priorities
· Increasing transparency
· Informing citizens and online polls
· Citizen-based project monitoring
In addition, for further engagement and the ability to gain the opinion of citizens in offline mode, many meetings and workshops have been held. These meetings aim not only to identify urban issues but also to create a dialogue between city managers, elites, and citizens to find solutions. The formation of local councils is one of the remarkable results of this initiative. Projects suggested by these committees are considered in NDPs. Also, to validate online submitted comments, face-to-face questionnaires have been done.
To make it possible for citizens to report urban problems, such as flooded streets and poor road conditions, the “137” hotline was provided. Recently, new features have been added to the system, and it is also available as an online service in the “MyTehran” application and website. Through “MyTehran” citizens can report a problem by sending a voice message, photo, or video as well as the location. Recently, an AI-based chatbot has enabled the platform to automatically respond to the citizens’ queries.
Leveraging the online service provision, citizen engagement has increased and the city has witnessed social and cultural improvements, especially in deprived neighborhoods. Projects and actions, derived from the bottom-up management approach have gained momentum in the city’s strategic objectives.
The expansion of digital platforms and services of Tehran municipality and the high smartphone penetration rate guarantee the technical feasibility of BAHAM. From the social viewpoint, the citizens’ demand for social media is high and the 10M population of Tehran, makes the received votes more reliable.
The project is in the operational phase and gaining momentum. More than 560K comments have been received through 137 since its launch in MyTehran. Statistics about the projects are provided below.
Citizens’ requests are analyzed via AI. Service provision to deaf people and chatbots are developed. Online citizens’ comments and suggestions are verified by face-to-face questionnaires. Crowdfunding is another innovative part of BAHAM, which is planned to be launched in the mid-term.
The designed model can be replicated not only in other municipalities in cities similar to Tehran but also in all organizations that provide services to citizens. Building trust in citizens, citizens’ digital readiness, and the promotion of service through public channels are the prerequisites.
In terms of inclusivity, special attention has been paid to the needs of para-ability citizens and everyone can share their opinions and suggestions. These goals are achieved by leveraging the voting and commenting features in the app and holding meetings on problem identification. It results in social justice improvement.
In line with the citizen engagement and neighborhood development, BAHAM supports and empowers the private sector as well as startups in order to help them in facing the ever-growing urban challenges. In this regard, the project has implemented a handful of elements through an integrated baseline, aiming at creating a synergy between the innovation ecosystem and municipality, from the Idea Creation to the proof of concept (PoC) and commercialization.
The provision of APIs, breaks down data silos and lets developers provide query-based online services to citizens. Holding reverse pitch programs with the goal of employing the professional private sector’s technical ability to solve the city problems, the launch of Urban Smart Technology Centers in order to gather the innovative teams together for responding to the city needs, and Smart Tehran TestBed as an approval structure for smart services and products, are other key actions of Tehran Municipality to deal with innovation ecosystem.
Originally published at https://medium.com on November 16, 2021.
