The Municipality of Catania, one of Italy’s largest metropolitan areas, is leveraging advanced technology to modernise its urban services.
With over a million residents, Catania balances the preservation of its historic architecture with the need to enhance service efficiency and quality of life. Utilising Hanwha Vision’s sophisticated camera systems and Park Smart software, Catania is on its way to achieving its smart city ambitions, particularly through innovative urban monitoring and intelligent parking solutions.
Smart urban monitoring system
Recognising the benefits that smart city technologies can offer, Catania's leadership adopted these innovations to improve data-driven decision-making.
The collaboration with Hanwha Vision brings advanced video analytics to the city’s core, allowing for real-time digital services such as parking availability. This initiative represents a pivotal step in Catania’s long-term smart city strategy, providing immediate value to both administrators and citizens by improving urban management and providing a scalable foundation for future expansion.
Effective parking monitoring
Catania's leadership adopted these innovations to improve data-driven decision-making
Integrating Hanwha Vision A-Series cameras with the Park Smart system creates an AI-powered parking monitoring network. This setup not only facilitates real-time monitoring of street parking but also aids in managing urban regulations effectively.
As a result, traffic congestion has been reduced, enhancing road safety and improving the overall experience for Catania’s residents. The cameras have been strategically installed at high-demand locations, blending seamlessly with the city’s Baroque heritage due to their discreet design, approved by the Superintendency for Cultural Heritage.
Data-driven urban planning
The edge AI cameras enhance time-to-insight by performing analytics directly within the devices, eliminating the need for costly servers.
They track various parking parameters like occupancy and availability, transmitting this information to a central dashboard which integrates with mobile apps and vehicle displays. This enables residents to quickly find available parking while providing city administrators with crucial data for informed urban planning and mobility policy refinement.
Expanding smart city capabilities
The success of the historic city centre project has prepared the ground for expanding this smart city approach
Going beyond parking, the AI-powered video analytics are poised to enhance public safety by identifying dangers like unsafe driving behaviour and unauthorised vehicle usage. The success of the historic city centre project has prepared the ground for expanding this smart city approach, with plans for incorporating traffic flow analysis, extreme weather monitoring, and other safety initiatives.
Catania’s smart city development is built on Hanwha Vision’s open platform, ensuring the system’s adaptability and scalability. The infrastructure supports the addition of more devices and the extension of coverage without major overhauls.
A spokesperson from the Municipality of Catania remarked, “This is a true smart city infrastructure in which we can provide significant services to our citizens, starting with intelligent parking and extending to broader urban monitoring and governance capabilities. Hanwha Vision’s solution gives us a secure, reliable, AI-powered video solution that transforms how we manage the city in real time.”
The Municipality of Catania is one of Italy’s largest and most complex urban areas, encompassing the city of Catania and 57 surrounding sites, with a population exceeding one million residents.
As the seventh-most-populated metropolitan city in Italy, Catania faces the dual challenge of preserving its rich historic and architectural heritage while modernising urban services to meet the evolving needs of its citizens, visitors, and local authorities.
Urban monitoring system
Catania leadership understood that smart city technologies could improve efficiency, sustainability, and quality-of-life while also enabling more data-driven decision making. The local administration turned to Hanwha Vision cameras and Park Smart software to make its smart city goals a reality, deploying intelligent parking and an urban monitoring system in the historic city centre.
The combined solution provides the city leaders with advanced video analytics and data insights, while citizens receive cutting-edge digital services such as real-time parking availability.
For years, the concept of a smart city had been discussed by the Municipality of Catania's leadership. The need for intelligent parking and urban management within the city centre provided the ideal opportunity to test advanced video analytics and smart parking software in a controlled environment before rolling out city-wide. The solution, therefore, needed to deliver immediate value to the administration and citizens while forming the foundation for broader urban intelligence initiatives.
Parking monitoring system
The combination of Hanwha Vision A-Series cameras with Park Smart provides a connected, AI-powered parking monitoring system that enables real-time visibility of available on-street parking while simultaneously supporting urban monitoring and regulatory enforcement. This has reduced congestion and improved traffic flow, boosted the citizen experience, and increased road safety.
Approximately 100 cameras are installed at strategic locations where parking demand is highest. Special consideration was given to aesthetics and heritage preservation: the selected cameras blend discreetly into the city’s Baroque architecture and were approved by the Superintendency for Cultural Heritage for installation directly on historic poles.
Urban planning decisions
The edge AI cameras carry out analytics within the devices themselves, improving time-to-insight and eliminating the need for costly servers. They monitor time-based and pay-per-use parking spaces, detecting availability and transmitting data in real time to a central dashboard. From there, information is shared with a mobile application and in-vehicle displays, allowing citizens to immediately locate the nearest available parking space.
For city administrators, the system provides valuable statistical insights into parking occupancy, turnover, and demand patterns. These data-driven insights support more informed urban planning decisions and enable the municipality to continuously refine mobility policies based on real-world usage.
Beyond parking management
Beyond parking management, the administration expects to use AI-powered video analytics to detect unsafe driving, for example, a motorcyclist not wearing a helmet, and vehicles circulating despite being impounded. This expands the system’s value beyond mobility into public safety and regulatory enforcement.
With the historic city centre project providing tangible value to citizens and the local administration, there are plans to scale the smart city solution to include traffic flow analysis, extreme weather monitoring, roadside waste detection, and broader urban safety initiatives.
Providing significant services
Building the smart city infrastructure on Hanwha Vision’s open platform provides the flexibility needed to add more devices and cover additional areas in the future without an extensive re-work of the existing infrastructure.
Spokesperson at the Municipality of Catania said, “This is a true smart city infrastructure in which we can provide significant services to our citizens, starting with intelligent parking and extending to broader urban monitoring and governance capabilities. Hanwha Vision’s solution gives us a secure, reliable, AI-powered video solution that transforms how we manage the city in real time.”
