Smart Cities at the Bishkek Urban Forum, May 2017: What Bishkek, Osh, Dushanbe and Moscow Said in One Room
On May 12, 2017, the «Smart Cities» panel of the Bishkek Urban Forum filled its room about thirty minutes before the session was scheduled to start, ran past the two-hour slot allotted to it, and continued into what was supposed to be the next session and the coffee break. KG Labs co-curated the panel with the Civic Initiative on Internet Policy from Dushanbe, and Aziz Soltobaev moderated. The reason the room was that full was visible in the speaker list: this was the first time five mayors’ offices and technology vendors from Bishkek, Osh, Dushanbe, Moscow and IBM had sat together on a Bishkek stage to compare what was actually working in their cities, and what wasn’t.
The framing of the forum was not a Kyrgyz-specific question. By 2017 the demographic projection that 90% of the world’s population would be urban by 2050 was already informing Bishkek and Osh planning conversations, and the daily evidence that municipal services were not keeping up with population density — civic-reporter posts about garbage, traffic, power, and street lighting — was running on Kyrgyz news sites every morning. The Smart Cities concept had also been written into the national Taza Koom digital-transformation programme, which meant the panel was not a thought experiment but a decision-making forum. People in the room were going to have to choose what to deploy, in what order, with whose technology.
Osh: An Interactive City Map That Already Worked
The first speaker was Zamirbek Askarov, vice-mayor of Osh, presenting alongside partners from the Youth of Osh civil-society organisation. Their project, built with international donor support, was an interactive mobile map of the city that let residents file complaints about utility services and route urgent civic issues into the mayor’s office faster than the existing channels. The presentation was concrete and operational: how the issue tickets routed, what response times had been before and after, where the gaps remained. The other speakers on the panel rated it the strongest single project on the floor — not because it was technically advanced, but because it had been shipped, was being used, and had a measurable effect on how Osh’s municipal services responded to citizen demand.
Dushanbe: When the Cheaper Sensor Is the Better One
Mukhammadi Ibodulloev, head of the Civic Initiative on Internet Policy of Tajikistan, walked through what Dushanbe had tried, what had worked, and what had been a wrong choice. The project that drew the most attention from the Kyrgyz audience was the city-market price monitoring system — cameras installed at major Dushanbe markets that captured retail prices for staple goods and fed them into a transparent public dataset. The scheme was inexpensive relative to the alternative (a manual reporting infrastructure), produced data the mayor’s office actually used in policy decisions, and could in principle be ported to small Kyrgyz cities planning analogous food-price monitoring. The pattern Ibodulloev emphasised — that the right technology in a small city was often the cheaper, simpler one rather than the most sophisticated — set the tone for the rest of the panel.
Moscow: The Limits Sensors Cannot See
Eldar Tuzmukhametov, who ran Moscow’s Smart City Lab inside the city government, gave the most useful diagnostic talk of the day. His slides ran through what Moscow had built — sensor coverage on roads, GPS on snowplows and street-cleaning trucks, monitoring of utility loads — and named the specific point where the monitoring infrastructure ran out of usefulness. GPS on a snowplow tells the operator where the vehicle was and how much fuel it consumed. It does not tell the operator whether snow was actually cleared, or whether the road was actually salted, because the act of cleaning is not what the sensor is sensing. Moscow’s next horizon, he said, was not more sensors but the analytical layer above them: machine-learning models that infer the quality of the work performed from indirect signals. For the Bishkek and Osh decision-makers in the room, the takeaway was sharper still: do not buy the sensors before you know what management decision the data will actually inform.
IBM: Predictive Safe-City and the Procurement Shape of Vendor Solutions
Viktor Ignatov, who led IBM’s Smart Cities division, presented the vendor view: what city-government clients typically needed, where IBM’s products integrated, and how the Safe City product specifically used predictive video analytics to compress municipal response times, raise road-safety outcomes, and lower facility operating costs. Ignatov was also direct about the management problems city governments encountered when deploying systems of this scale — the procurement shape, the integration with legacy municipal databases, the staffing and analytics capability needed to operate the systems after delivery. For a Bishkek mayor’s office contemplating a Safe City rollout, that operational layer was almost more useful than the product specification.
Habidatum: When the Cameras Are in the Wrong Place
Ekaterina Serova, vice-president of Habidatum, raised the level of the conversation by asking whether technical solutions matched citizen needs in the first place — and what the term «smart city» was actually supposed to mean. Her presentation worked through two examples. In Rio de Janeiro, temporal-spatial analysis of CCTV camera positions and crime locations had found that the cameras were largely not where the crimes occurred — the rollout had followed the visibility of installation contracts, not the data on where surveillance would actually deter crime. In London, a similar analysis showed public spaces being used heavily during certain hours and standing empty during others, with completely different demographic groups occupying the same physical space at different times of day. Both examples pointed at the same conclusion: a city is a temporal object as much as a spatial one, and most «smart city» deployments treat it as if only the spatial axis exists. Habidatum’s Chronotope platform was the operational version of that argument.
What the Room Decided to Care About
The audience question section ran longer than the panel itself. Most of the questions were operational — would Safe City projects perform in Kyrgyz cities the way IBM had described, when could the Osh interactive-map project be replicated in Tokmok or Karakol, what would it cost a small Kyrgyz mayor’s office to start with the cheapest version of any of these systems. The most consequential question was implicit and came up across most of the answers: should a Kyrgyz city deploy any of this before deciding what specific civic outcome it wanted to improve, and whether a non-technological solution to the same problem was already available. The conclusion Aziz Soltobaev wrote into the moderator’s resume after the session was that one sentence: «before introducing technologies, decide what the goals are and what non-technological solutions exist for the same task.» The smart-city question is finally about decisions, not equipment.
The forum continued the next day with separate panels on citizen participation, public spaces, sustainable architecture, the right to the city, and a session for the mayors of Kyrgyz cities convened by IPR, GAMSUMO, and the Union of Local Self-Governments. The Smart Cities panel, however, was the one whose participants stayed in touch afterwards: the Osh-Dushanbe-Bishkek line that had formed in the room turned into the working network for several of the civic-tech projects that ran in 2018 and 2019, including KG Labs’ Safe City and Safe Society hackathon later in 2017.
Event Details
| Forum | Bishkek Urban Forum 2017 (Форум Городов) |
| Dates | 12–13 May 2017 |
| Location | Bishkek |
| «Smart Cities» panel | Day 1, 13:30–15:30, Hall Б |
| Panel co-curators | KG Labs Public Foundation; Civic Initiative on Internet Policy of Tajikistan |
| Moderator | Aziz Soltobaev, KG Labs |
| Panel speakers | Zamirbek Askarov (vice-mayor of Osh, with Youth of Osh); Mukhammadi Ibodulloev (Civic Initiative on Internet Policy, Tajikistan); Eldar Tuzmukhametov (Smart City Lab, Moscow Government); Viktor Ignatov (Smart Cities division, IBM); Ekaterina Serova (vice-president, Habidatum) |
| Panel context | Taza Koom national digital-transformation programme; urbanisation trend; civic-reporter media pressure on Bishkek and Osh mayors’ offices |
| Other Forum curators | World Bank (urban planning); National Institute for Strategic Studies (urban data); IPR, GAMSUMO, Union of Local Self-Governments (mayors’ session); ОФ «Наше право» + ОФ «Городские инициативы» (Right to the City); ОФ «Инициатива АРЧА» (urban greening) |
