The smart city development initiatives, traditionally, have mainly focused on use of technology for better governance, creating facilities for public and facilitating administration. However, this focused more on developing sophisticated technology, creating and maintaining databases, advanced computing, etc. Such approaches, however, have resulted in involvement of high cost and less returns, leading to under-delivery of potential benefits of smart city concept. A smart city to reach its full potential requires a people-centric initiative which is about citizens living there and which is centred around their needs and problems that they face. These public-centric initiatives are about involvement of the public in its development and implementation. In other words, these people-centric smart city initiatives are about ‘collaborative technology' that brings about collaboration among urban communities, citizens, and city governments. This chapter is an attempt to study some of the people-centric smart city initiatives of the world.
TopIntroduction
Currently, the concept of Smart City has generated high level interest in India with the government projecting ‘The Smart City Mission’ as a much sought way of economic growth. The Smart City project is hailed as an engine of growth for the Indian economy.
One of the major causes behind this notion is rapid urbanisation that is taking place in India. According to census 2011, nearly 31% of India’s population lived in urban areas and contributed about 63% of India’s GDP. With the current rate of urbanisation, urban areas in India are expected to accommodate about 40% of India’s population and contribute nearly 75% to India’s GDP by the year 2030. This rapid urbanisation will require comprehensive development of physical, institutional, social and economic infrastructure in the urban areas to improve the quality of life of people and to attract investments in the city. Smart City development can be considered as a step towards this direction.
Even though there is no single definition of Smart City available, Deakin and Al Wear have list four important factors that contribute to the definition of a smart city:
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The application of a wide range of electronic and digital technologies to communities and cities
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The use of ICT to transform life and working environments within the region
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The embedding of such Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in government systems
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The territorialisation of practices that brings ICTs and people together to enhance the innovation and knowledge that they offer.
TopResearch Problem
The smart city development initiatives, traditionally, have mainly focused on use of technology for better governance, creating facilities for the public and facilitating administration. However, this focused more on developing sophisticated technology, creating and maintaining databases, advanced computing etc. Such approach however, has resulted in involvement of high cost and less returns, leading to under-delivery of potential benefits of smart city concept.
Some of the previous studies related to smart city management and evolution has revealed following important points-
According to Myeong and Lee (2022), the smart city concept emerged as a new trend to answer challenging issues related to urban development. The focus of smart cities is switching from infrastructure supply-oriented approaches to improving citizens’ quality of life and sustainability. Similarly, Muvuna (2020) and others have observed that transformation of a city system into a smart system is meant to improve the quality of life for its people and their way of living, its environment, economy, transportation, and governance. Del-Real (2021) and others argued that innovation for the sake of innovation is not smart, but rather that a smart city is intertwined with and responsive to its community.
In view of Zhu (2021) and others, a smart city should be an urban area with accessible and secure ICT infrastructures, reliable and efficient physical infrastructures, productive and innovative economy, equal and inclusive society, sustainable and resilient environment, and participatory and transparent governance. According to Capdevila and Zarlenga (2015), the basis of smart cities is the combination of human capital, social capital, information, and communications technology infrastructure in order to generate economic development and improve the wellbeing and quality of life.
However, Dameri and others (2014) believed that previous studies have often not focused specifically on quality of life and citizen-centric issues. It has been stated that smart cities did not always reach their objectives because they did not take into consideration the needs of citizens.