Smart Cities; What Do We Need?

The concept of smart cities offer a developed habitable region, good working environment and sustainability through high-end urban planning and adequate provisions for utilities and control of resources. Depending upon the level of development, the approach towards a smart city advances. In fact, how the citizens are willing to accept the change and its reforms also plays an important role in the theory of smart city

- Vibha Singh

Building 100 new smart cities is high on the agenda of the new government. However, the concept of smart cities must be seen in the Indian context and without the biases of techno-centrism and one-size-fit-all solutions. With increasing urbanization and the load on rural land, these cities are models of sustainable urban life, combining the latest high-end information and communication technologies with state-of-the-art architectural design fully integrated into ever-present urban environments. Smart cities are most likely to boost real estate and required in order to promote innovations such as green homes, facilitate rise of urban infrastructure and maintain security by presence of effective regulatory bodies such as Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 (RERA).

How will it help?

Smart technologies can help us make our cities more efficient. In case of mobility. The sharing economy is now entering many domains (think AirBNB, etc.) and can be applied to our transportation infrastructure. Cars are idle 95 percent of the time, making them an ideal candidate for the sharing economy. It has been estimated that every shared car can replace ~10-30 privately owned cars. Also, the impact of car sharing will grow exponentially with the advent of self-driving cars. Self-driving vehicles promise to have a dramatic impact on urban life, because they will blur the distinction between private and public modes of transportation. “Your” car could give you a lift to work in the morning and then, rather than sitting idle in a parking lot, give a lift to someone else in your family – or, for that matter, to anyone else in your neighborhood, social-media community, or city.