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.

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.

Developing a Citizen-centric Smart City Solution

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.

Real-time Traffic and Parking Management

The combination of Hanwha Vision P-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.

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.

Future Plans

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. 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.”