Context
Barcelona is one of the most visited cities on the planet. Tourism is one of the city’s primary economic sectors, generating more than 150,000 direct and indirect jobs, but at the same time, the growth of tourism has become one of Barcelona’s most prominent challenges.
The Eixample district is one of the areas of the city where tourism is mostly concentrated as it is home to the city’s iconic attractions such as the Sagrada Família and La Pedrera, as well as emblematic thoroughfares such as Passeig de Gracia and Rambla Catalunya.
Managing the movements and flows of pedestrians is a big challenge for any tourist city. Efficient management based on real-time data can be essential to ensuring and promoting positive cohabitation of tourists with local citizens. Eixample is an ideal district for testing new tools and innovative solutions that will encourage more sustainable tourism.
In 2022, the Call How can we promote a more sustainable tourism in Eixample was launched to find innovative technologies to address this issue.
The solution
Affluences is a French-based start-up specialized in the measurement, forecasting and communication in real-time of crowd levels.
The pilot
Affluences sensors will be installed and will measure the concentration of people and the influx of crowd around iconic areas such as Sagrada Familia, Casa Batló, La Pedrera and Plaça Catalunya. The technology implemented will allow to do a local algorithmic processing of video streams on the fly (computer vision).
The Eixample District will be provided with an intuitive dashboard that will help internally to use the real-time data collected to find patterns in the pedestrians movements around the neighbourhood and to inform public policies.
