RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Financial District continues to upgrade its infrastructure with smart solutions as the Kingdom’s future city looks to host “hundreds of thousands” people in the coming years, according to its CEO. With footfall continuing to increase each year, KAFD has undertaken a major project to develop a smart parking app that will allow people working or residing in the district to reserve a parking spot with a tap on their smartphones. “Today we get an average of 10,000 visitors a day. By the end of 2024, or early 2025, we expect hundreds of thousands of people living or working in KAFD,” said Gautam Sashittal during a panel discussion at the Future Hospitality Summit in Riyadh. KAFD, which is going to be a 24/7 district combining residential, commercial, entertainment, retail and hospitality, currently has over 50 ongoing projects. Smart mobility is a key component of the area, which allows towers in the district to stay connected using intelligent and smart building management solutions. Other mobility solutions available at KAFD include smart scooters, which offer a safe and efficient form of transportation, and shuttle buses within the district. KAFD is partnering with Google Maps to use z-axis vertical location technology to map the vertical parts of locations around buildings to ensure visitors have a better way of navigating through the district. Other technologies qualifying KAFD as a smart city include the “use of face recognition when entering buildings in KAFD, and the use of smart cameras and AI to predict crowd behavior,” said Sashittal. However, he pointed out that the biggest challenge in keeping a city smart is maintaining and rebuilding its assets, and ensuring that “your assets look new, even 50 years down the road.” For a city to remain smart, he added, it needs to continue to improve and optimize its overall operation, asset management, and user experience, and this is why “KAFD set the standard for a smart city.”