The world is witness to a paradigm shift in population shifting from rural to urban landscape. The fact of the mater remains that there are already more people living in cities than rural areas, by 2050 almost 70% of the world is expected to move towards cities as suggested by the United Nations.
Such rapid urbanisation boosts the global influence of cities, in some respects elevating them above nation states as significant drivers of innovation, enterprise and social progress. However, the pace of change—particularly at a time of global economic, environmental and social uncertainty—creates a raft of challenges to sustainable development. Nevertheless, cities that adopt smart, sustainable development practices are well placed to meet these challenges.
In fact, in the Networked Society, it becomes possible for cities to thrive without their development taking a major toll on scarce resources. ICT allows people, knowledge and devices to be networked in new ways, and cities that embrace ICT’s potential can create new value, operate efficiently and benefit from significant return on investment (ROI). All this adds up to more livable, more attractive and ultimately more competitive cities, as well as the potential for people to pursue a more sustainable urban future.
The ways in which cities balance economic competitiveness, environmental pressures and social needs will impact the lives of billions of people. Indeed, the significance of cities is well recognised in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While Goal 11 is related to sustainable cities and communities, the actions of cities also have the potential to affect all 17 SDGs.
Complex problems require action on multiple fronts, but a common enabler across the board is ICT.
Indeed, a report published in September 2015 by the Earth Institute at Columbia University argues not only that ICTs can accelerate the achievement of the SDGs, but also that the quality of institutions can be defined by the extent to which they incorporate “cutting-edge solutions to facilitate the provision, transparency and efficiency of public services”.
As drivers of change, cities now have more and better technological tools at their disposal than ever before. Our vision in a Networked Society is convergence of many powerful forces, such as near-ubiquitous connectivity, mobility, big data, 3D printing, robotics and cloud technologies. Globally, there are now as many mobile subscriptions as there are people, and the proportion of these that are associated with smartphones is now around 45% and growing rapidly. Meanwhile, the IoT will comprise 26 bn connected devices by 2020. The significance and benefits of smart, sustainable cities are
increasingly well documented and understood. However, it is important not to focus on individual smart solutions, but to take a broader view of a smart, sustainable city as one that uses ICT to improve livability, workability, resilience and sustainability.
Many of the major challenges of smart, sustainable city transformations stem from variety of issues and the complexity of the stakeholder ecosystem. Failure to understand and fully engage across this ecosystem compromises the success of transformation projects: in particular, projects with limited stakeholder engagement or a narrow focus risk resulting in vertical solutions that do not capitalise on ICT’s full potential. There have been many “smart city” projects that have neither improved the long-term sustainability of the city nor ensured ongoing progressive development beyond the original project scopes. Successful transformations require holistic strategiesto harmonise expectations and approaches and to leverage the inherent strengths of ICT to provide powerful platforms, integrated systems and reusable approaches to a vast range of situations.
The government of India (GoI) has clubbed all its digital programmes under “Digital India” with an estimated budget of R1.13 lakh crore projects initially. It has also approved a plan for building 100 smart cities in India with an outlay of R48,000 crore. In this regards, the GoI has recently released the list of 20 cities to initiate the Smart cities mission, of the 98 cities 24 are capital cities, another 24 are business and industrial centres, 18 are culture and tourism influenced areas, 5 are port cities and 3 are education and health care hubs.
Smart, sustainable cities will play an instrumental role in ensuring better economic and environmental conditions. And if deployed effectively and with sustainability as a core target, ICT can accelerate progress toward the related goals.
-Nitin Bansal
The writer is vice-president and head of network products, Ericsson India
