Smart City Management Platform

All of a municipality's operational and service-oriented departments (Water and Sewerage, Parks and Gardens, Traffic Management, Environmental Protection, Municipal Police and Social Services) had historically run on different software systems, often unaware of one another. Citizen requests arrived through different channels — the municipal website, the call centre, written petitions and social media — each was held in a separate system and handled with inconsistent prioritisation across departments.

Field teams were in an even worse position. Mobile crews such as parks and gardens, public works and the municipal police received work orders on paper forms, took photos on their phones and returned to the office at the end of the shift to enter the data manually. This both reduced operational efficiency and prevented managers from getting real-time visibility.

The need was clear: a smart city infrastructure that brings all departments together on a single platform, offers GIS-based visualisation, manages citizen requests in a single pool and coordinates field teams in real time.

For the first phase we designed a modular architecture of 8 modules: water/wastewater management, parks and gardens operations, traffic analysis (with integrated IoT sensor data), environmental monitoring (air quality, noise), a citizen portal (web + mobile), a field team mobile app (iOS/Android), a municipal police operations centre and a management dashboard. Each module scales independently, but they share a common identity, authorisation and data layer.

The frontend was built with React 19 + TypeScript; the field mobile app was released cross-platform with React Native. The backend runs on Node.js + PostgreSQL + PostGIS (for geospatial queries). Citizen requests pass through a Kafka-based stream-processing layer and are automatically assigned to the relevant department; escalation kicks in when an SLA is breached.

For the GIS layer we chose MapLibre — open source and compatible with KVKK (Türkiye's Personal Data Protection Law) and data-residency requirements. IoT sensor data flows through an MQTT broker into TimescaleDB and is monitored in real time on a Grafana dashboard.

Particular attention was paid to WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance, which is mandatory because the citizen portal is a public service. Every component went through an accessibility audit and screen reader support was tested. The audit log infrastructure needed as evidence of KVKK and TS ISO/IEC 27001 compliance was set up correctly from the very start.