Kaohsiung City promotes smart city development through digital technologies to provide citizens with better living conditions, attract high-tech investment and talent, and enable local companies to grow together. In 2022, Kaohsiung City received numerous international smart city awards, from the APEC ESCI Best Practices Award – Low Carbon Model Towns Gold Award, the IDC Smart City Asia Pacific Awards (SCAPA), and many others. This demonstrates that Kaohsiung’s transportation, agriculture, low-carbon measures, and sustainable development have caught the world’s attention and created enticing opportunities for the international market to invest in Kaohsiung.
Mayor Chen’s “4 priorities – industry first” strategy has been further progressed into an industry development blueprint. With the CPC refinery plant’s transformation, TSMC brings its entire industry chain to invest in Kaohsiung, and the “Semiconductor S Corridor” has gradually been rolled out. In Kaohsiung’s Bay Area, it focuses on promoting diverse local industries combined with 5G AIoT, such as somatosensory gaming, ocean technology, smart manufacturing, smart healthcare, and innovative services. Smart applications have been implemented and the plan for Kaohsiung Bay Area 2.0 is to develop the coastal economy, encouraging the finance and technology sector’s headquarters to consider Kaohsiung’s Bay Area to form a corporate headquarters cluster.
The global trend towards low-carbon sustainability is highly connected to future industry development. Kaohsiung City has put much effort into intelligent transportation, the first MaaS in Asia, and electric vehicle projects. In the future, the transportation system will integrate external transportation to all science and technology parks to build a smart transportation corridor. As for EVs, a primary tool for building a low-carbon sustainable city, the city government collaborated with the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to construct national autonomous vehicles in Ciaotou Science Park, positioning Kaohsiung City as a smart city demonstration site for electric vehicle development. In the future, Kaohsiung City will develop a “smart electric bus ecosystem export” to continue promoting the EV industry chain and V2X development, facilitating Kaohsiung’s smart and sustainable two-axes transformation.
In March 2023, Taiwan will host the “Smart City Summit & Expo,” which is Asia’s largest international smart city exhibition. The venue is Kaohsiung Bay Area, the largest 5G AIoT demonstration site. Kaohsiung’s smart city applications will be showcased to convey to the global audience the latest innovations of Kaohsiung City.
