Smart Cities for a Developing World

Why cities become 'Smart'

Smartness or efficiency is desirable for beneficial gains from a given resource or process. The present day smart city approach tries to enhance human efficiency of resource use for sustainability and better life quality in urban areas.
Advancement in information communication technology (ICT) to collect and analyse big data and applying it through AI mode is a transformational breakthrough in human endeavour to achieve efficiency.

Developed vs Developing World

However, countries are at different stages of economic development and those economically undeveloped or developing have different priorities as well as challenges in leap frogging to the smart city concept operationalised through ICT.
Further, unlike developed countries, which addressed economic, social and environmental development issues sequentially and in that order, developing countries are addressing them all simultaneously. This compels the developing countries to adopt different characteristics and definition of a smart city in their context. For them, promoting health, transport, employment, and citizen partnership while at the same time managing environmental pollution become vital factors. Efficient and sustainable provisioning of these factors is targeted to achieve the smart governance and defines a smart city in the developing world.

The need for Smart Cities in a Developing World

According to the UN Centre for Human Settlement, by 2030 about 85% of the people would be living in the developing countries. A further 60% of them in urban areas. Thus, governments in the developing world would need empowered and enthused partnership by the citizens and successful development models of smart cities from the developed world.
Typically, such smart governance is characterised by anticipation, flexibility, adaptability, decision-making ability, stakeholder participation and foresightedness.

Summary

Because of the advanced nature of the field, Smart Cities for a developing world remains a largely unexplored topic. But it is here that these technologies can create the most impact, and reach the most number of people.

About the Author

Dr. Jagmohan Sharma is an IFS (Indian Forest Service) Officer with the Karnataka State Government. He earned his PhD from the Centre of Sustainable Technogies, on the impact of climate change on forests and biodiverity, at IISc (Indian Institute of Science). He generally writes about Climate Change and is enthusisatic about how technology can shape the future of humanity.