Realising smart cities dream: A few lessons from Rio de Janeiro

By Uday Salunkhe

Recently the Union Cabinet has cleared a project to develop 100 smart cities across India and revitalise another 500 in the country, with a budget running to approximately Rs 1 lakh crore over a period of five years. While Rs 48,000 crore has been allowed for the Smart Cities Mission, a sum of Rs 50,000 crore has been sanctioned for Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation of 500 cities — also called Amrut — that could subsequently lead to cities becoming smart subsequently.

But what is a smart city?

Like most universal concepts, the concept of smart cities has diverse connotations for different audiences. One definition by Caragliu and Nijkamp (2009) says that “A city can be defined as ‘smart’ when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure, fuel, sustainable economic development and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory action and engagement.”

For their definition, Frost & Sullivan (2014) maintains that “We identified eight key aspects that define a Smart City: smart governance, smart energy, smart building, smart mobility, smart infrastructure, smart technology, smart healthcare and smart citizen,” which is very similar to the definition by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Smart Cities Council, Washington, USA.

For its part, the Government of India has underlined its priorities by laying down its definition of a smart city in 2014, by saying, “Smart City offers sustainability in terms of economic activities and employment opportunities to a wide section of its residents, regardless of their level of education, skills or income levels.”

The definition itself indicates the sharp insightfulness of our policy makers, who have clearly acknowledged the fact that people migrate to cities primarily in search of employment, at times, better standards of living, and also for lifestyle-related reasons. Therefore, at least in the Indian context, a smart city needs to offer employment opportunities to a wide section of its residents, irrespective of their level of education, skills or income.

Therefore, it becomes imperative to support, among other factors, the required skill development of the population. This would help a Smart City develop the required environment for the creation of economic activities and employment opportunities. There are other crucial influences to take care of in order to make India’s 100 Smart Cities actual cities of the future. Here are a few:

Smart planning of the entire development cycle: Development is best used as a channel to further an idea to fruition. But that means it is but a part of a large overarching plan. If it’s the transport eco-system that is being overhauled, then each individual element in the map should be able to pull its own weight. The Metro should be able to ply the requisite amount of passengers in the designated period of time, etc.

In Mumbai, the railway networks, bus systems, monorail and the metro should ideally be intelligent elements of a complex but connected and smooth-functioning transport system. Only when each piece plays its part well can the entire system function at its optimal best.

Smart planning based on expert advice and research: The importance of the pre-development phase cannot be emphasised upon enough until the implications are felt – of course, it’s always too late by this phase. At all times, most importantly in the strategy-making phase, experts of all the necessary fields should be consulted to lock on to the most effective solutions.

Be it the academia or industry experts, a high-level consulting board will bring about healthy debates and discussions along with loads of experience that will throw up several solution options for each problem.

The group will also serve as a knowledgeable think-tank who can correctly gauge the feasibility of the proposed ideas and plans. This additional step can be the clinching factor in eliminating many errors upfront at the planning stage, a much better proposition than discovering mistakes in the middle of the course.

In the developing world, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, host of the 2016 Olympics, has been able to revitalise itself in terms of improved public transportation and new solutions to infrastructure issues. Rio was dealing with its aging infrastructure, rising crime rates and the inability to effectively respond to natural disasters. Flash rains and floods were playing havoc in the lives of its over six million citizens.

In order to turn the situation on its head, the government reached out to IBM to build a centre to predict and coordinate its response to emergency incidents such as weather-related crisis situations. So an IBM Operations Centre was built in six months to house officials from 30 city agencies to do just that. The city gained a high-resolution weather forecasting and hydrological modelling system — that can predict heavy rains in an efficient, organised manner. Transportation issues were better monitored through real-time data culled from sensors and video cameras.

The transformation and investment has since paid off in terms of competent traffic management and improved response time to and coordination of emergency incidents. The command centre offers daily updates on weather, traffic and alternative routes suggestions to residents, making life much easier than before.

Given that weather-related crises and other calamities plague Indian cities too, a similar or related solution could do wonders for our proposed Smart Cities. Given that IT is our stronghold, we have the expertise to meet the challenge head-on.

Meaningful collaborative coalitions: As seen in the Rio example, a recurring key attribute in the smart city concept worldwide has been the collaboration of two or more partners. What would be more effective is the efficient teamwork between the government and private partners.

In a city like Mumbai, the government should actively engage the Advanced Locality Management (ALM) bodies and invite them to play important roles in as many civil initiatives as possible. ALMs would ensure that the ideas on paper are carried out in the real world in an effective manner. Recent figures suggest that there are at least 765 registered ALMs in the city with almost 450 active. These are very healthy figures to bolster an initiative such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan – an important campaign to uplift the face of the country’s civil state of affairs.

The recently developed Indian School of Business’s Smart Cities Index, which helps compare cities in terms of quality of life, also points out how “smart governance” and “smart people” will contribute crucially to building effective smart cities. This is just another nod to the power of crowdsourcing for idea generation and selection that the world has witnessed many times over.

At the end of the day, smart cities are a new concept meant for man, and as such cannot function in isolation. The successful implementation of this notion will be proof of the insightfulness and cohesiveness of all the stakeholders and is, therefore, a very important exercise that needs to be carried out carefully.

The author is group director, Welingkar Institute of Management