Case study · Vigo

Vigo's HALO becomes audible.

The Vigo City Council embeds NaviLens GO into its smart-city posts EUSSIA® · Smart Public Space: the HALO lift at Serafín Avendaño, the Gran Vía escalators and the Vialia intermodal hub share one accessible, multilingual grammar.

Lower access to Vigo's HALO lift at Serafín Avendaño: large white circular structure over the green wall, with a ring-shaped walkway and a glazed lift; in the foreground, a smart-city post with IOTSENS cameras and sensors and a white plate carrying the NaviLens GO code 'Smart Public Space · Access here' from Vigo City Council

EUSSIA®

Vigo's Smart Public Space platform

2030 Agenda

Co-funded by NextGen EU Funds

HALO + Gran Vía

Twin lift Casablanca · García Barbón and humanised ramps

NaviLens GO

Voice, multilingual and no-aim scanning for blind users

The client

Vigo City Council
Vigo 2030 Urban Agenda

Vigo is one of the European cities most committed to humanising public space: outdoor escalators on its hills, urban lifts such as HALO, linking the Casablanca district with García Barbón, and the full overhaul of the Gran Vía between Mª Berdiales and Venezuela.

On top of that transformation, the council rolls out EUSSIA® · Smart Public Space: a platform with proprietary sensors (IOTSENS), 40 km of municipal fibre and a citizen dashboard that measures, at each node, renaturalisation, humanisation, inclusion, accessibility and environmental safety. The Vigo 2030 Urban Agenda and the European PRTR funds co-finance the programme.

On every post, alongside the standard QR, a NaviLens GO code now rides with the tag «Access here», in Galician and Spanish, so the information about each place can also be heard.

§ The challenge

A vertical city that knows how to speak.

01
A vertical city to measure and narrate
Vigo is hillside: outdoor escalators, urban lifts like HALO and elevated plazas. Every new node —designed to humanise the street— had to tell citizens what it does, how it is performing and how to use it, and do so for those who cannot read a panel.
02
Smart-city sensing with no entry barrier
EUSSIA® measures noise, air quality, footfall, thermal comfort and urban greenery at each location. Open data only matters if it reaches everyone: residents, tourists and people with sensory or cognitive disabilities alike.
03
One universal code, in Galician and 42 languages
The council needed a common label to unify the grammar of public space —HALO, Gran Vía, Vialia, humanised plazas— that could sit next to the standard QR without asking blind users to aim or international visitors to understand Galician.

§ The solution

The same post measures the city and tells it to those who can't see it.

Every EUSSIA® node carries, alongside the cameras, environmental sensors and the QR to the citizen dashboard, a large-format NaviLens GO code. The plate is colour-coded by zone —white at HALO, orange at Vialia and the plazas, green along Gran Vía— but always keeps the same signature: «Smart Public Space · Access here».

With the free app, a blind or low-vision user scans without aiming from several metres away and hears, out loud, the name of the place, its function (lift, ramp, stop, plaza), the open data from the node and the directions to the next safe point.

Information is always delivered in the phone's language —Galician, Spanish, English, Portuguese…— with no barrier for visitors arriving in a port that hosts cruise ships almost every week.

§ Point by point

From HALO to Gran Vía, without losing the thread.

Elevated humanised plaza with wooden decking, artificial turf and grey paving, crossed by a black smart-city post with an orange Smart Public Space plate showing the NaviLens GO code and 'Access here' QR; in the background, the white metal canopies of Vialia station and a large multicoloured mural on an urban facade

Side view of Vigo's new Gran Vía, with continuous planters full of young trees, shrubs and red flowers; a lamp post holds a green Smart Public Space plate with the NaviLens GO code and 'Access here' QR and, in the background, the green canopies of the new humanised escalators

The same IOTSENS post with cameras and environmental sensors, white Smart Public Space plate and NaviLens GO code, set against a residential building in Vigo — showing how every smart-city node integrates sensory accessibility alongside the open data for the place

Full view of the HALO urban lift at Serafín Avendaño, with its signature white ring cantilevered over the green wall and the buildings of García Barbón in the background; in the foreground, the smart-city post with cameras and the white NaviLens GO plate marks the accessible entrance to the HALO–Vialia complex

One single grammar for the whole city: «post three metres ahead, Gran Vía at Bolivia, air quality good, escalator going up to the left». Accessibility stops being an add-on and becomes urban infrastructure.

§ Why it matters

The first smart city that is also audible.

EUSSIA®

Vigo City Council's own platform manages renaturalisation, humanisation, inclusion and environmental safety at every node. NaviLens makes those KPIs accessible to blind and low-vision people.

42 languages

Galician as the local language, Spanish and 40 more at no extra cost. Vigo is a port and cruise city: every visitor hears the street in the language of their phone.

2030 Agenda

Embedding NaviLens in every post is part of the urban strategy co-funded by NextGen EU funds and the PRTR (HALO project P06_L2).

§ Sources

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