Abu Dhabi: The Abu Dhabi City Municipality (ADM) has launched a new service as part of the Unified Portal Services App of the Department of Urban Planning and Municipalities named Rasid.
The service aims to engage community members in detecting eyesores marring the appearance of public facilities, cities, streets as well as public and private facilities.
This initiative stems from the municipality’s belief in the importance of enhancing the participation of community members in protecting cities from all forms of disfiguring elements, consolidating the values of social responsibility and developing partnerships with government institutions and various segments of society.
Rasid is an intelligent interactive system for engaging the community with the municipal system in monitoring negative practices and behaviour. It seeks to raise the public awareness and involve the community in the social responsibility of the municipal system towards protecting facilities provided to serve their needs and bring them happiness.
The system monitors violations and distortions and sends reports to government agencies for onward submission to the competent authorities. The overall objective is to achieve the targeted recovery rates and rectify the wrong attitudes towards facilities and city components.
Rasid service contributes to raising the awareness and participation of the community. It reflects the need of the municipal system to cover all districts and residential areas, and benefit from the community’s opinion and contributions. It also opens a window to engage the community to activate rapid responses and remedies to cases.
As for the monitoring process, the system starts monitoring the situation (taking images), automatically works out coordinates and takes down notes. The communication is then automatically established by referring the monitored case to the municipality to view the case and determine the party concerned. In case of no prior monitoring, the case is then referred to the district supervisor to tackle the situation according to the inspection procedures.
In the event of prior monitoring, a thank-you letter is sent to the client informing that the same case had already been monitored and that necessary procedures are being taken according to regulations. Then the centre concerned will take necessary procedures to rectify the situation and issue guidance according to the regulations and laws of the municipal system.
According to the questionnaires circulated on the most important distortions and violations committed in this regard, the housing of bachelors and congested accommodations are the top violations. Next comes the selling of items without a licence in public places (street vendors), temporary or poor boundary walls, dumping waste outside designated containers, abandoning vehicles in public and standing or sitting in a way impeding the movement of others in public places.
Other offences include hoisting flags, slogans or symbols in a way distorting the general appearance, accommodating workers in the workplace in a way causing disturbance to others, abandoned or old buildings distorting the city view, broken sewage pipes, leaving furniture and rubbish in the open, dumping the demolition debris and construction waste in public places.
All members of the community can use Rasid by logging into the unified portal of the Urban Planning and Municipalities Department of the Municipality of Abu Dhabi City, and sign up in the Smart Pass (smartpass.government.ae). Any individual can then send monitoring cases (distortions, irregularities) via the application.
