67
Kamal Asif, Aligarh Muslim University Aligarh, India
Introduction
The rapid growth of the world’s population, especially in developing countries like India, has already had and will continue to have an impact on settlement patterns and on the growth of some of the largest metropolitan cities. Situations of such human agglomerations will likely be aggravated because they are the centres of national spatial structure that, due to historical and political reasons, do not serve adequately the needs of developing nations (for e.g. India) (Hardoy, 1973).
It is a general perception that most urbanization policies are related to the interests of state level governments who aim to counterbalance the concentration of economic activities, populations, and institutions in particular geographical areas (Hardoy, 1973). It has also been recognized that state level governments are not fully equipped to solve most urban problems (Hardoy, 1973). We have wasted too much time, effort, and money trying to promote local or metropolitan master plans that have proved to be of little or no value because they did not anticipate for unplanned economies and/or they did not receive adequate support from state level governments.
Cities will have to be planned and built with new approaches and technologies that will require different institutions (e.g. geospatial technologies) to solve the many problems that they will pose, such as land utilization, communication, transportation etc. Solutions to the most pressing urban problems will depend on the values adopted by societies and therefore, making use of resources in a systematic manner. In this sense, making cities ‘smart’ is one such solution and an ambitious urban project of the Government of India, who plan to build 100 smart cities across the country, as proposed in the budget of 2014-15. As much as the vision of smart cities appears rational in terms of addressing several urban problems, the implementation of this massive urban project ‘smart cities’ with the present level of socio-economic condition might be difficult in India. However, as a rapidly developing economy, the country needs to keep up with global standards, and hence, the execution of this plan could help India take a major leap in the development race.
Globally, the conception of the ‘smart city’ is not new. To develop a city, planning is an essential part of addressing a profusion of problems ranging from energy requirements to proper governance, all of which are to be smarter in the where all appears sustainable. Over and above all, sustainability of ‘the environment’ must not be sidelined. Here, pertinent questions are what a smart city is and how it could be smart?
A smart city is often defined as a city where information and communication technology is used in every sphere (Parikh, 2015), and which is essential for achieving the goals of a smart city. However, it is not, by itself, a goal. A smarter city is outfitted with high-tech communication cap