Social Integrity in Smart Cities

One very good point that is emerging strongly in the write up at home page of this blog is the need to bring sociological integration of the new smart city. Admittedly, when the smart city is built with best of infrastructures having best of comfort zones, ultimately it would be inhabited by people. Who will be those people? Of course, those who are already inhabiting them if it happens to be old habitats and those who buy new houses and lives there. In either situation it would be a society with varied social, religious, ethnic, lingual and ritual background. When it happens to be a large geographical tract, the integration becomes rather smooth and easy due to high absorption capacity. But, in the event of a small and narrow geographical spread, particularly when it happens to be a new conglomeration, as one may see in the case of high rise buildings or corporate construction of new townships, the process of social integration, as it evolves over a period of time, may become stressful at individual or family or collective level. It is not that the old urban habitats in their formative stages did not pass through such sociological processes, stresses and transformations, sometimes even giving rise to conflicts and tensions at different levels within the family and outside the family. At the same time it offered best example of harmonious living as well. In some cases, the dominance of dominant group overshadowed and prevailed upon. The question then remains, should it be left on the market forces where price and income alone becomes the deciding factor or it should have elements of minimum dos and donts with prescriptive civic orders? Whose values and norms would it prevail upon and govern the civic orders? How to avoid cultural invasion and cultural dominance in such scenario? Should it be that the old paves way for the new, compromising on older values and systems? Is it going to be case of greater western styles of social values and mores or even the old has a place to live in? I am leaving these and related questions to the larger audience to ponder upon and offer well thought out views so that the urban planners draw upon them while designing the new world of smart cities.

Dr. Tej