Emergency managementRio builds a high tech integrated urban command center

Rio de Janeiro's intergrated urban command center // Source: cas.go.jp

Rio de Janeiro is one of the most densely populated cities in South America. Much of the city is vulnerable to flooding, and about three-quarters of Rio’s districts have areas at risk of landslides. High temperatures can make living situations unbearable. In addition, a high crime rate and poor infrastructure make the city difficult to govern. In preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, authorities are looking to improve living conditions, response times to disasters, and establish a more efficient system to deal with the city’s many challenges.

A 2010 rain storm encouraged Rio’s mayor Eduardo Paes to develop a solution for dealing with future rain storms and disasters. Such a system will help monitor the city, share information across departments, manage emergency crews, and direct repairs. Paes’s solution is a two-story control center called Centro de Operações Preifetura do Rio de Janeiro (COR), located in the Cidade Novo district.

The Guardian reports that the high tech integrated urban command center unites Rio’s thirty departments and some private suppliers in a single monitoring room where operators can track real-time conditions of the city and coordinate a response to emergencies and disruptions. Data are shared in real-time with various city departments and private contractors covering transportation, sanitation, health, and security services. About seventy COR workers operate on desktop screens and observe designated areas of the city on a giant wall monitor divided into a grid showcasing live video feeds from traffic and surveillance cameras.

Urban geography researcher at Durham University, Andrés Luque-Ayala, calls the system the “quintessential smart city project.”

“Rio has a very specific topography and local weather system,” says Luque-Ayala, “so (COR) has its own advanced monitoring systems installed across the city. Rio is also a place that’s historically been hard to govern, and it’s about to face some crunch moments, like the Olympics and World Cup, that will put more stress on its infrastructure. By integrating all these key departments COR definitely improves the capacity of the city to react to emergencies.”

The $6.3 million COR built by IBM Brazil is a work in progress, as operators try to synchronize the system’s capabilities with the human element and bureaucracy that comes with Rio’s many government agencies. “There are still challenges,” says Pedro Junqueira, the 32-year-old chief executive of COR. “We are only four years old, some of these departments are 30, 40, even 100 years old, like the street cleaning companies. Integrating them is a daily job. And it’s not a vertically structured situation — we collaborate and make decisions together. The operations center did not just become the boss of those 30 departments.”

COR has been tested by a few major disruptions during the past year, including a sanitation workers’ strike during Carnival which left many districts in horrible conditions. “It was horrible,” Junquiera says. “We treated it like a crisis situation and made use of every resource the city had.” The staff at COR reassigned other city employees to help with the trash cleanup. “We worked with many different companies, contracted by city hall, in different areas, to maintain the minimum. But the minimum was still far below our needs.”

Supporters of COR say that the ultimate test will be how COR operates during this year’s World Cup tournament.