Tech roundup, Aug. 9, 2019 | Brazil makes a push for smart cities

You’re reading The Brazilian Report‘s weekly tech roundup, a digest of the most important news about technology and innovation in Brazil. This week’s topics: Brazil’s push for smart cities. How Brazil is an attractive market for legal tech startups. Didi’s strategy for Brazil. And the robots which could replace political analysts.

Brazil’s push for smart cities

The Brazilian government launched the National Strategy for Sustainable Smart Cities, which will create indicators and goals to foster innovation in Brazil’s major urban centers. The National Secretary of Telecommunications and Digital Policies, Vitor Menezes, said a smart city is defined by “the use of innovative infrastructure to promote the well-being of local communities through four pillars: social, environmental, cultural, and economic.”

During the plan’s presentation, government officials laid out their first priorities: the installation of security cameras with facial recognition software, crop monitoring technology, systems to reuse rainwater, and urban mobility projects. “Brazil has an infrastructure problem. So we can’t talk about smart cities before having the basics done,” said the secretary.

Smart cities in Brazil

Italian-British company Planet has announced bold plans to build ten smart cities in Brazil by 2022 (it is more accurate to call them ‘smart neighborhoods’, however). The pilot project (Laguna Smart City) was built in São Gonçalo do Amarante, in the northeastern state of Ceará. The project cost USD 50 million on a land spanning 330 hectares. So far, 90 hectares have been built, with the first families moving in in January

Architecture website Arch Daily wrote a review on it:

“Its success isn’t associated to the amenities of living in a smart city, however, as tempting as the idea of living in a city where many things can be controlled by a phone app, it seems that the most convincing explanation for the numbers is in the...