Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, is one of the world’s longest inhabited cities. It has a history dating back to the eighth century BC, making it 29 years older than Rome. In recent decades, the city’s population has surged to 1.1 million residents, solidifying its position as the center of political, economic, and cultural life in the country.
Yerevan Municipality, the administrative body of the city, is dedicated to evolving Yerevan into a more sustainable, efficient, and resident-centered city. At the heart of this evolution lies geographic information system (GIS) technology, empowering officials to streamline operations and better meet the needs of Yerevan’s residents.
Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinyan, speaking at the World Congress on Innovation & Technology on October 6, 2024.
Given Yerevan’s rich history and cultural heritage as well as this rapid growth, it is no surprise that city officials have faced significant urban challenges. Historically, Yerevan struggled to manage different sectors like transportation, environmental monitoring, and urban planning.
Municipal staff had to deal with fragmented data sources, often from traditional, disconnected systems. These data silos delayed information updates and limited city staff’s ability to analyze and visualize data holistically. This, in turn, impacted timely decision-making and resource allocation.
By 2024, officials recognized that to meet their goals as a city, they needed to reshape how they managed data across various sectors. The plan was to equip municipal staff with the right technologies to simulate scenarios, make data-driven projections, and improve the quality of life for Yerevan residents through advanced urban management techniques.
GIS facilitated service gap analysis and provided insights into the number of residents who could benefit from the transportation services. Also offered advanced network analysis tools to address routing challenges .
Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinyan, in his address to the World Congress on Innovation and Technology on October 6, 2024, outlined the city’s digital transformation plans to enhance the quality of life for its residents.
“The city is a single organism, with interconnected business processes. By having data from these processes in one platform [GIS], we [can] create a digital twin of the city,” said Avinyan.
For help with this digital transformation, the municipality turned to GEOVIBE, Armenia’s leading GIS company. GEOVIBE specializes in providing innovative spatial solutions for a wide range of industries, including governments.
GEOVIBE consultants partnered with municipal staff to implement ArcGIS Enterprise, a comprehensive software system that enables users to manage, map, visualize, and analyze their data. By employing ArcGIS Enterprise, staff can unify spatial data management, streamline departmental communication, and enhance public services.
By deploying ArcGIS Enterprise and other GIS tools, Yerevan Municipality now operates within a centralized platform where data from all relevant sectors is accessible to multiple departments in real time. This provides a common operating picture that enhances cross-departmental coordination.
The Active Citizen platform, a cornerstone of Yerevan Municipality’s public engagement strategy, is expertly designed to facilitate citizen participation by collecting complaints and requests for support .
With ArcGIS Enterprise, municipal staff across departments use a variety of GIS tools to guide their work. For example, urban planners can access transportation data to consider transit patterns when approving new developments. They also use ArcGIS Pro to create and publish web maps, conduct advanced spatial analysis, and create detailed 3D models of the city’s layout. This visualization helps in planning new developments and optimizing public transport routes, ensuring better access to services for all residents.
ArcGIS Dashboards—an app that is used to create dashboards—helps municipal officials visualize real-time data, guiding their efforts to improve urban planning. The dashboards display critical data like public engagement requests, environmental data, and waste management reports, allowing city officials to make quick and informed decisions. For instance, municipal officials can track and visualize public requests and complaints in real time, helping them prioritize and allocate resources more effectively. Constituent engagement has become more responsive due to GIS integration with the city’s Active Citizen platform. This integration allows city officials to track, visualize, and respond to public requests and complaints more efficiently. Dashboards and interactive maps show request hot spots, helping officials prioritize and allocate resources where they are needed most.
Municipality to optimize the distribution of recycle bins and enhance the efficiency of garbage truck routes, leading to more effective and sustainable waste management practices throughout the city.
The dashboards also display real-time air quality data, allowing city officials to quickly identify and address pollution sources when linking with other layers of information. This has helped staff improve environmental monitoring, enabling city officials to identify and mitigate pollution sources as they arise.
Municipal staff use mobile GIS applications, like ArcGIS Survey123, to plan and collect data for waste management. These apps help staff accurately locate many thousands recycling bins and track garbage trucks, providing detailed and geotagged information. The system reduces manual oversight, ensures timely collection, and supports sustainable practices by offering insights into route efficiency and bin usage. ArcGIS Dashboards enhance field operations by visualizing this data, which helps improve route optimization and reduce fuel consumption.
Municipal staff use ArcGIS Notebooks to automate and schedule data updates from different platforms within the city. This ensures that officials always have the latest information, which is important for making informed decisions and improving how the city operates.
Capacity building and training for the staff to ensure sustainability.
Yerevan Municipality has transformed its operations with ArcGIS Enterprise, bringing significant improvements. By moving to an integrated, real-time digital system, the city has saved time, reduced costs, and enhanced citizen engagement.
Real-time dashboards and automated data updates have streamlined decision-making, allowing for quicker responses to residents’ requests and urban challenges. Departments like environmental monitoring, urban planning, and transportation collaborate efficiently, leading to better-coordinated projects and reduced unnecessary spending.
This shift has made the city more proactive and responsive to urban challenges, setting a new standard for urban management and positioning Yerevan as a model for sustainable development in the region.
Looking ahead, Yerevan Municipality plans to expand its GIS capabilities. Key goals include:
These advancements will further position Yerevan as a leader in smart city innovation, using GIS to build a resilient and data-driven urban environment and moving towards the accomplishment of the vison of making Yerevan, one of the oldest cities in the world, a smart and modern city capital of the 21st century, with one of the world’s most advanced city management systems for a comfortable, safe and attractive life for its citizens and visitors.
By having data from these processes in one platform GIS, we can create a digital twin of the city. This will not only improve planning and management of the city’s economy by combining interconnected processes with big data, but also enable us to simulate scenarios, make projections, and improve the lives of our citizens.
Learn more about the products used in this story
Esri offers multiple product options for your organization, and users can use ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Pro, or ArcGIS Location Platform as their foundation. Once the foundational product is established, a wide variety of apps and extensions are available.