Innovating inter-governmental collaboration for smart emergency response system : Daejeon smart city operation center, 2010-2017

Abstract

"Help me! Save me! Please!” Imagine that you witness an urgent situation and call 119, the emergency call number in the Republic of Korea (hereafter “Korea”). What if the emergency services team arrived on-site within six minutes, already recognized the situation and immediately began taking action? Daejeon, Korea’s fifth-largest city, successfully improved the quality and efficiency of its urban public services with a smart solution. Daejeon was the first city in Korea to integrate Information and Communications Technology (hereafter “ICT”) infrastructure such as municipal networks and Closed-Circuit Televisions (hereafter “CCTV”) at the metropolitan level. By 2013, Daejeon opened the Daejeon Smart City Operation Center, persuading relevant agencies on the need for equity in urban services and sustainably operating ICT devices. The relevant institutes combined their budgets and 10 departments with similar responsibilities from different organizations joined the center. Soon after, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport (hereafter “MOLIT”) selected Daejeon as its research and development pilot smart city in 2014. The Daejeon local government and the national government worked together to introduce and customize the integration platform that connected five safety services for citizens. This collaborative work filled the gap of local government’s lack of authority or financial capacity to accomplish its smart city goals with technical, financial, and institutional support from the national government. From 2015 to 2017, the average response time for 119 emergencies in Daejeon decreased from about seven and a half minutes to less than six minutes. The city’s crime decreased by about 5% and the arrest rate increased by about 7.7% over the same period. As of 2019, 49 local governments in Korea had adopted Daejeon’s “smart city” model.