Envisioning The Post-Pandemic Smart City

Context: The pandemic has come as a remarkable opportunity to review the paradigm of smart cities and to steer the course of hundreds of other towns that are not on the map.

About Smart city 

     

• Technocratic vision: With sensors everywhere, smart homes, high levels of connectivity, massive and ubiquitous data collection by various agencies, and a continuous flow of useful information to citizens.
• Ease of governance: All this can help governments allocate resources optimally and take timely decisions to raise efficiency and improve standards of living.

Elements of  Smart City Mission (SCM) – Programme to create 100 smart cities
    
     

• Transformation of cities: Cities no longer remain a reflection of poverty and bottlenecks; rather they should become symbols of efficiency, speed and scale.
• Addresses urban issues: Including infrastructure deficits, inadequate water supply, waste management, sewerage and transport arrangements, high levels of pollution and, with climate change, frequent extremes of floods and drought.
• Amalgam of upgraded civic services and expensive showpiece projects: In chosen cities, with investments heavily influenced by Centre.
• Infrastructural convergence: SCM projects converged other infrastructure programmes such as AMRUT, Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana etc.
• Latest official count shows that 5,924 Mission projects worth Rs 1,78,500 crore have been tendered.
• A Health Focus: When the Smart City Awards 2020 were declared recently, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs gave one component of the scheme, the Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCCs), a health focus.
• These centres, of which 70 are operational, functioned as “war rooms” for COVID19, and, combined with “other smart infrastructure developed under the mission, helped cities in fighting the pandemic through information dissemination, improving communication, predictive analysis and supporting effective management.

Critical analysis of SCM:

• Silly gimmicks: No substantial intervention in city life.
• Planning ignores informality that marks India’s urban spaces.
• Non-inclusive: Pressure to frame poster projects often cuts out many.
• Poor review mechanism: Using the Ease of Living index is a biased report card of SCM as it is based on perception survey, leaving aside a broad parametric approach.

Way forward:

• Facilitate structural shifts in city life: The Danish urban design expert, Jan Gehl, speaks of the universal values of a city as one that is a meeting place of people, inviting them to spend time, walk, bike, and roam around public etc.
• Pedestrianisation over motorisation is also a marker of a good city.
• Envision green and blue city: Freeze all diversion of wetlands and commons for any other development, creating new urban gardens and water bodies, and doing a climate change audit for every piece of infrastructure planned.
• Allocate more space of the commons: Creating opportunities for pedestrianisation, biking and harmonious opportunities for street vending.
• Pursue essential modernisation: Such as deployment of multiple sensors to gauge air, noise and water pollution, provision of electronic delivery of citizen services, intelligent public transport, expansion of renewable energy.
• Recovery of valuable materials from waste remains a lost opportunity even in the biggest cities. 
• Democratising smart cities planning: Ensure every section of society has a voice in the process, and not merely those who have digital access.