Embrace us all - Smart Cities India
Sustainable smart communities or divided Indian societies with few benefiting from innovation in technology and remaining left behind, what do we want? In late 1990s American zoning and city planning happened to favour some privileged ones more due to slight alterations made in building density codes and due to ‘gated communities’ that worsened the social fabric. The physical barriers lead to privatisation of common public spaces, creating a private world that shared less with its neighbourhood[1]. It’s a matter of concern that we might be getting flown with new trends emerging from the buzz word ‘smart’ thus loosing on a holistic approach towards growth and development for all. We should be very careful such that no further social divide is caused due to any of our hasty smart city development guidelines.
The Ministry of Urban Development has made benchmarks for various services — EG. Maximum commute time should be 30 minutes in medium-sized cities and 45 minutes in metros; water availability must be 135 litres per capita per day; 95 per cent of homes should have amenities in close proximity within 400 meters like shops, parks, primary schools and recreational areas and so on[2]. A detailed analysis is very essential before going for greenfield developments while aiming on these set benchmarks and formulating best strategies for our smart cities. We should first focus more on retrofitting existing cities, brownfield & redevelopment projects, than further encroaching on our limited land resources.
There is no perfect cook book that would alleviate all our urban problems nor there a single channel towards making of our smart cities. There are multiple methods and approaches towards this mission and our cities need one that is best suited in its regional context. In fact it’s more of a process that is evolving everyday with new thoughts, new emerging technologies, scientific inventions, philosophies and theories to improve on methodologies. An important concern is that smart cities formulators may be converging benefits mostly to technically evolved people and those who can afford to buy high tech products and services. As a result, the Indian smart city dream that is being envisiond about bringing best infrastructure, best resource and energy management systems, sustainable developments for social, institutional, economical and other developments would probably be seen disproportionately fragmented in our Indian societies and thus making it worse for us than American gated community scenarios in future.
India, being a nation that is diversified socially, economically, with high illiteracy rate compels us to be more innovative and think out of the box solutions in helping ourselves. Every community within their socioeconomic boundaries is unique and needs a customised solution that can be possible only when people of communities themselves participate or in some ways their views, opinions, experiences and knowledge are used in decision making through crowdsourcing. People’s participation is an important aspect of smart cities, so our first basic step should be using technologies and methodologies to equip our local bodies and government with tools to involve citizens in decision making and bringing transparency in all activities. ICT based government alliance can give us opportunities to achieve this goal at every community level and with multiple other open source technology driven strategies it can bring better and immediate positive outputs. In a situation where IT companies have not made their presence in a locality, does not mean people in these areas shall remain deprived of technology based products and services. Our focus should be making every community smart and sustainable using most appropriate technology in serving people and always encouraging participatory approach.
Recently ‘smart’ has become a buzz word but technology has been penetrating our environments since long ago. We need to follow the best smart community models of which some examples we have in our own nation too. Warana village in Maharashtra is a wired village that uses ICT platform initiated in 1998 by the Prime Minister’s Office Information Technology (IT) Task Force to increase the effectiveness and productivity of the sugar cane co-operative. The project also aimed at providing a wide range of information and services to 70 villages around Warna. With the help of technology Warana sets an example of a rural community that empowers its people to participate and avail secure employment, better health facility, education and financial services etc[3].
ICT platforms have helped fill communication gaps in sugarcane industry in northern state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Sugarcane Information System (SIS) in UP is the largest rural information technology that won the gold award at the 15th National Conference on e-governance in 2012 for its excellent service to the sugarcane farming community (Around 29 lakh farmers and their families)[4]. Sugarcane grower societies, mills and farmers communicate efficiently for better business with fresh harvest using technology that makes communities in UP smart. We need to widen application of technology into much more avenues of city’s growth that is people centric.
There are open software and applications giving opportunities towards crowd sourcing via social networks and social media that can be used to engage people in building our smart cities. We need to bring right minds and skills for decision making and allow peoples participation for best results in making of smart cities. We need to make best use of our educated population and use their knowledge and expertise. An example that I would like to site where professor, Jennfer Evans Cowley along with Greg Griffin had together conducted a study and analysed more than 49000 microblogs posted on twitter, fb and linkedin. This is a good example to understand how micro blogging through social networking websites like FB, twitter, linkedin etc have been used as a medium to bring people to participate. This level of micro participation was tracked and integrated for sentiment analysis at a single platform, SNAPP (SOCIAL NETWORKING AND PLANNING PROJECT). Text analysis software (Linguistic Inquiry & Word Count) was carefully used with criteria that filtered ambiguities like sarcastic statements/ emoticons etc, and segregated negative and positive sentiments of people related to various issues concerning transportation and mobility plan in Austin,TX[5].
Our smart phones that is the most immediate internet of things (IoT) that we carry in our pockets gives us tremendous opportunities to becoming more vigilant and active citizens. Boston city crowd sourced for roadside maintenance with a smart phone app called Street bump by new urban mechanics in July 2012. It allows drivers to report road hazards automatically by sensing bang. The Big data then was processed and analysed[6]. Traditionally a crew of city public work department would have to drive through the road to spot potholes which is time taking. The advancement in technologies, big data, real time data and analytics are bringing to us more effective ways for analysing huge urban/ rural information that is helpful in reshaping our cities and villages. With further development in technology, process will become simpler and people will have better individual choice to ways they want to communicate their opinions that can be used in decision making process in cities.
Another perspective to our new trends is that our cities are probably already becoming smart due to market forces. The technology based products and services that’s coming in almost every field is already leading us towards smart living in an incremental way. Bit by bit all products are gradually becoming IoT and thus demanding more connectivity. There is a continuous pressure to innovate technically advanced services and products that has intensified competition in tech market. Open source consortiums are another big catalyst for such competitions. Open source software and applications push proprietary ones to improve on quality and cost effectiveness to survive in market. Our governing local bodies can play a significant role by participating and facilitating appropriate environment for such competitions which will further promote better quality products and services to citizens. The regional network in southwest Virginia, USA is the largest integrated fiber and wireless open access, open services municipal network. Three local governments in partnership with Institute and county public schools have accomplished this project jointly[7]. Open, free and community-owned IoT, data network kind of model is something that we need to explore for fostering good base in our smart communities, thus making smart cities. Opportunities with crowdsourcing are very powerful in making of smart communities and cities.
Satellite data may be used for laying good efficient network plan at local levels to mitigate redundancy of signal strengths. An example was worked out in a paper presented in Geo spatial world forum in 2011 - Signal Strength measurement and coverage estimation of mobile communication network was mapped using IRS-IC Multispectral and CARTOSAT-1Stereo Images. A good community owned and community driven network, open data and software would allow us to use our cell phones and other wearable technologies immediately towards our goals in making of smart communities. There are many tools available and we have many good methodologies documented in research papers by our scientists and professionals. We must engage our scholars, scientists, professors in making of our knowledge based smart communities and achieve least scope to flaws in planning.
We have tons of sensitive issues to take care of. If technology can bring us so far, then we should be confident that it will bring better solutions always with right approach. Social integrity is important to consider right from the very basic level. Last month I went to a local market and I saw a poor vendor preparing peanuts for selling in his small shop. He used a very traditional technique in processing and packing of peanuts. A question came to me, how is he going to benefit from smart cities? We need to explore more in technology that has brought to us opportunities with radio frequency identification (RFID) through which IoT can be widely used. There will be a possibility that irrespective of how tech savvy a vendor is, he would still be able to join the online marketing world. With this there could be a way to bring all these small vendors in a categorised local service provider list online. This will bring them better business and will give people more options in their local markets without having to travel outside. We must strive for enhancing trade and commerce at all levels and brining small scale business also into the main stream. The concept of sites and services by Christopher Charles Benninger can be taken to a new level with technology driven surveillance and many other opportunities with technology, thereby addressing to housing issues for our urban poor. Most importantly, community goals should be of prime concern and people’s participation must be incorporated while defining these goals in our planning process for smart cities.
Conclusion:
We want to strive for a smart city model that is deep rooted in our smart communities. Smart city strategies should encompass all socioeconomic class for collective growth thus making a smart liveable city, eliminating any further social discrepancy. With the help of technology we shall aim at enhancing city infrastructure, housing for all, resource management, healthcare, education, trade and commerce etc at all levels and include small scale business also into the main stream effectively. With more innovation in technology and using IoT can bring solutions that can empower people irrespective of their knowledge levels and become part of the network society without being left behind. This is important as a huge population in our country still fear technology and many are not even educated. So we must be humble with our creativity in technology to embrace all while continuously striving for awareness and education among masses.
Various possibilities of collaboration with government and non government organisations shall together work on bringing free, open crowdsourced community driven network models where data will be public asset and not be in control of any kind of gatekeepers leading to monopoly or manipulation to suit their own interest in market. We should give more importance to making our existing cities and its communities smart than expanding and encroaching our limited land resource. We must have effective plans for land conservation and maximise opportunities with ICT based technically improved infrastructure aiming for least possible spreading or expansion on land.
We do not want unequal tech benefits in our societies. We want to engage our community trusted knowledge partners and professors and scientists and intellectuals in firming base for our smart city goals and objectives. Community goals must be our main focus with respect to key issues in regional context and public participation must be integrated in our smart city planning process. We need not wait for a final ICT based tool from a big company to come in and brand our cities with their names, maximising their own profits and making us a lucrative market. We should try for a multidimensional approach towards making of our smart cities while watching and allowing various roles to play in market trends, open consortiums, government strategies backed with people’s participation, public/ private collaborations, educational Institutions, knowledge partners, intellectuals, scientists, professors, and professionals. It’s our place so we must participate and know what’s best for our cities and dictate our terms ourselves in making of smart communities.
The Ministry of Urban Development has made benchmarks for various services — EG. Maximum commute time should be 30 minutes in medium-sized cities and 45 minutes in metros; water availability must be 135 litres per capita per day; 95 per cent of homes should have amenities in close proximity within 400 meters like shops, parks, primary schools and recreational areas and so on[2]. A detailed analysis is very essential before going for greenfield developments while aiming on these set benchmarks and formulating best strategies for our smart cities. We should first focus more on retrofitting existing cities, brownfield & redevelopment projects, than further encroaching on our limited land resources.
There is no perfect cook book that would alleviate all our urban problems nor there a single channel towards making of our smart cities. There are multiple methods and approaches towards this mission and our cities need one that is best suited in its regional context. In fact it’s more of a process that is evolving everyday with new thoughts, new emerging technologies, scientific inventions, philosophies and theories to improve on methodologies. An important concern is that smart cities formulators may be converging benefits mostly to technically evolved people and those who can afford to buy high tech products and services. As a result, the Indian smart city dream that is being envisiond about bringing best infrastructure, best resource and energy management systems, sustainable developments for social, institutional, economical and other developments would probably be seen disproportionately fragmented in our Indian societies and thus making it worse for us than American gated community scenarios in future.
India, being a nation that is diversified socially, economically, with high illiteracy rate compels us to be more innovative and think out of the box solutions in helping ourselves. Every community within their socioeconomic boundaries is unique and needs a customised solution that can be possible only when people of communities themselves participate or in some ways their views, opinions, experiences and knowledge are used in decision making through crowdsourcing. People’s participation is an important aspect of smart cities, so our first basic step should be using technologies and methodologies to equip our local bodies and government with tools to involve citizens in decision making and bringing transparency in all activities. ICT based government alliance can give us opportunities to achieve this goal at every community level and with multiple other open source technology driven strategies it can bring better and immediate positive outputs. In a situation where IT companies have not made their presence in a locality, does not mean people in these areas shall remain deprived of technology based products and services. Our focus should be making every community smart and sustainable using most appropriate technology in serving people and always encouraging participatory approach.
Recently ‘smart’ has become a buzz word but technology has been penetrating our environments since long ago. We need to follow the best smart community models of which some examples we have in our own nation too. Warana village in Maharashtra is a wired village that uses ICT platform initiated in 1998 by the Prime Minister’s Office Information Technology (IT) Task Force to increase the effectiveness and productivity of the sugar cane co-operative. The project also aimed at providing a wide range of information and services to 70 villages around Warna. With the help of technology Warana sets an example of a rural community that empowers its people to participate and avail secure employment, better health facility, education and financial services etc[3].
ICT platforms have helped fill communication gaps in sugarcane industry in northern state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Sugarcane Information System (SIS) in UP is the largest rural information technology that won the gold award at the 15th National Conference on e-governance in 2012 for its excellent service to the sugarcane farming community (Around 29 lakh farmers and their families)[4]. Sugarcane grower societies, mills and farmers communicate efficiently for better business with fresh harvest using technology that makes communities in UP smart. We need to widen application of technology into much more avenues of city’s growth that is people centric.
There are open software and applications giving opportunities towards crowd sourcing via social networks and social media that can be used to engage people in building our smart cities. We need to bring right minds and skills for decision making and allow peoples participation for best results in making of smart cities. We need to make best use of our educated population and use their knowledge and expertise. An example that I would like to site where professor, Jennfer Evans Cowley along with Greg Griffin had together conducted a study and analysed more than 49000 microblogs posted on twitter, fb and linkedin. This is a good example to understand how micro blogging through social networking websites like FB, twitter, linkedin etc have been used as a medium to bring people to participate. This level of micro participation was tracked and integrated for sentiment analysis at a single platform, SNAPP (SOCIAL NETWORKING AND PLANNING PROJECT). Text analysis software (Linguistic Inquiry & Word Count) was carefully used with criteria that filtered ambiguities like sarcastic statements/ emoticons etc, and segregated negative and positive sentiments of people related to various issues concerning transportation and mobility plan in Austin,TX[5].
Our smart phones that is the most immediate internet of things (IoT) that we carry in our pockets gives us tremendous opportunities to becoming more vigilant and active citizens. Boston city crowd sourced for roadside maintenance with a smart phone app called Street bump by new urban mechanics in July 2012. It allows drivers to report road hazards automatically by sensing bang. The Big data then was processed and analysed[6]. Traditionally a crew of city public work department would have to drive through the road to spot potholes which is time taking. The advancement in technologies, big data, real time data and analytics are bringing to us more effective ways for analysing huge urban/ rural information that is helpful in reshaping our cities and villages. With further development in technology, process will become simpler and people will have better individual choice to ways they want to communicate their opinions that can be used in decision making process in cities.
Another perspective to our new trends is that our cities are probably already becoming smart due to market forces. The technology based products and services that’s coming in almost every field is already leading us towards smart living in an incremental way. Bit by bit all products are gradually becoming IoT and thus demanding more connectivity. There is a continuous pressure to innovate technically advanced services and products that has intensified competition in tech market. Open source consortiums are another big catalyst for such competitions. Open source software and applications push proprietary ones to improve on quality and cost effectiveness to survive in market. Our governing local bodies can play a significant role by participating and facilitating appropriate environment for such competitions which will further promote better quality products and services to citizens. The regional network in southwest Virginia, USA is the largest integrated fiber and wireless open access, open services municipal network. Three local governments in partnership with Institute and county public schools have accomplished this project jointly[7]. Open, free and community-owned IoT, data network kind of model is something that we need to explore for fostering good base in our smart communities, thus making smart cities. Opportunities with crowdsourcing are very powerful in making of smart communities and cities.
Satellite data may be used for laying good efficient network plan at local levels to mitigate redundancy of signal strengths. An example was worked out in a paper presented in Geo spatial world forum in 2011 - Signal Strength measurement and coverage estimation of mobile communication network was mapped using IRS-IC Multispectral and CARTOSAT-1Stereo Images. A good community owned and community driven network, open data and software would allow us to use our cell phones and other wearable technologies immediately towards our goals in making of smart communities. There are many tools available and we have many good methodologies documented in research papers by our scientists and professionals. We must engage our scholars, scientists, professors in making of our knowledge based smart communities and achieve least scope to flaws in planning.
We have tons of sensitive issues to take care of. If technology can bring us so far, then we should be confident that it will bring better solutions always with right approach. Social integrity is important to consider right from the very basic level. Last month I went to a local market and I saw a poor vendor preparing peanuts for selling in his small shop. He used a very traditional technique in processing and packing of peanuts. A question came to me, how is he going to benefit from smart cities? We need to explore more in technology that has brought to us opportunities with radio frequency identification (RFID) through which IoT can be widely used. There will be a possibility that irrespective of how tech savvy a vendor is, he would still be able to join the online marketing world. With this there could be a way to bring all these small vendors in a categorised local service provider list online. This will bring them better business and will give people more options in their local markets without having to travel outside. We must strive for enhancing trade and commerce at all levels and brining small scale business also into the main stream. The concept of sites and services by Christopher Charles Benninger can be taken to a new level with technology driven surveillance and many other opportunities with technology, thereby addressing to housing issues for our urban poor. Most importantly, community goals should be of prime concern and people’s participation must be incorporated while defining these goals in our planning process for smart cities.
Conclusion:
We want to strive for a smart city model that is deep rooted in our smart communities. Smart city strategies should encompass all socioeconomic class for collective growth thus making a smart liveable city, eliminating any further social discrepancy. With the help of technology we shall aim at enhancing city infrastructure, housing for all, resource management, healthcare, education, trade and commerce etc at all levels and include small scale business also into the main stream effectively. With more innovation in technology and using IoT can bring solutions that can empower people irrespective of their knowledge levels and become part of the network society without being left behind. This is important as a huge population in our country still fear technology and many are not even educated. So we must be humble with our creativity in technology to embrace all while continuously striving for awareness and education among masses.
Various possibilities of collaboration with government and non government organisations shall together work on bringing free, open crowdsourced community driven network models where data will be public asset and not be in control of any kind of gatekeepers leading to monopoly or manipulation to suit their own interest in market. We should give more importance to making our existing cities and its communities smart than expanding and encroaching our limited land resource. We must have effective plans for land conservation and maximise opportunities with ICT based technically improved infrastructure aiming for least possible spreading or expansion on land.
We do not want unequal tech benefits in our societies. We want to engage our community trusted knowledge partners and professors and scientists and intellectuals in firming base for our smart city goals and objectives. Community goals must be our main focus with respect to key issues in regional context and public participation must be integrated in our smart city planning process. We need not wait for a final ICT based tool from a big company to come in and brand our cities with their names, maximising their own profits and making us a lucrative market. We should try for a multidimensional approach towards making of our smart cities while watching and allowing various roles to play in market trends, open consortiums, government strategies backed with people’s participation, public/ private collaborations, educational Institutions, knowledge partners, intellectuals, scientists, professors, and professionals. It’s our place so we must participate and know what’s best for our cities and dictate our terms ourselves in making of smart communities.
Pallavi Prakash Jha
[1]Snyder, Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail. “Divided We
Fall: Gated and Walled Communities in the United States.” New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1997, 1997.
[2] Gandhi, Feroze Varun. “What makes cities really
smart.” The Hindu Current Affairs - SMART CITIES , 24 April 2015.
[3] Simone Cecchini, Monica Raina. “Warana: The Case of an
Indian Rural Community .”
[4] Mishra, Professor Abhishek. Best Practices in
e-Governance, Uttar Pradesh, LAND OF UNLIMITED POTENTIAL. Minister of
State, Department of Science and Technology,Government of Uttar Pradesh, 2012.
[5] Jennifer S. Evans-Cowley, Greg Griffin.
“Micro-participation: The Role of Microblogging in Planning.” Columbus, 2011.
[6] Simon, Phil. “Potholes and Big Data: Crowdsourcing Our
Way to Better Government.” www.wired.com. 2014.
http://www.wired.com/insights/2014/03/potholes-big-data-crowdsourcing-way-better-government/
(accessed 12 01, 2015).
[7] Mitchell, Christopher. Community Owned Open Access
Fiber and Wireless Network in Virginia. 21 04 2009.
https://ilsr.org/community-owned-open-access-fiber-and-wireless-network-virginia/
(accessed 11 30, 15).
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