Smart Cities: Proceed With Caution

We need to be careful about accepting public-private partnerships and technology as the panacea for all ills.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a mission to make our cities ‘smart’. The jury is still out on what makes smart, but speed, efficiency and optimisation enabled through superior governance and technology, and financed through monetisation of assets and publicprivate partnership are suggested by the Smart Cities Mission. As an inspirational call for citizens to take pride in and participate in community building, it has been marketed well and has ensured enthusiastic participation of competing cities in the Smart City Challenge.

Indian cities have problems of a magnitude and complexity that defy conventional solutions. The experience with the models of urban development we have implemented in the past is that they have failed us spectacularly. This is an out-of-the-box idea that attempts to break the logjam created by antiquated systems, low capital and skills available with the government. As an angel investor, the government only seeds the initial capital and allows for what are essentially competing business plans with the best socioeconomic sustainability to take over the mandate of city building. It’s a hands-off-model with low resource investment and potentially high rewards to accrue in a limited time.

The competitive nature of the challenge can spark innovative thinking in urban design and adoption of best practices can grow through the network of individual test bed cities. Designing from first principles and stitching new scalable models of development that can be emulated is the promise implicit in the process. The focus on technology creates an opportunity to leapfrog to better means without going through the whole developmental curve.