Rapid urbanisation is a worldwide reality and more than half of the world’s population currently resides in urban areas. At the same time, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are not only becoming more pervasive but are also being seamlessly integrated into different aspects of governance as well as day-to-day living. These trends together are changing the landscape of human settlement, with significant implications for living conditions, the environment, governance and development. The concept of ‘smart city’ is at the intersection of the need for better management of urbanisation by leveraging ICTs and the integration of ICTs for personal use.
One description, from Wikipedia, describes a smart city (or a smarter city) as one ‘that uses digital technologies to enhance performance and wellbeing, to reduce costs and resource consumption, and to engage more effectively and actively with its citizens. Key 'smart' sectors include transport, energy, health care, water and waste.’
One of the most critical, and perhaps the most challenging, components to ensure the sustainability of smart cities is civic engagement and proactive public participation. Technology is an enabler for the kind of social process and the kind of engagement we should be promoting in our cities. Planners would need to enable and promote new tools to engage local communities to collaborate and co-develop cities – from crowdsourcing ideas, taking concerted action or participating in opinion polls and referendums to decide what they feel about key proposals. The key is to move away from a one-way monologue to an interactive discussion where feedback matters. Citizens can report on everything from malfunctioning traffic lights, to removal of garbage, broken roads or even reporting on health issues.
By effectively using open data technologies and processes, policy makers are able to add value to existing public services. This not only enables citizen participation but also contributes to the potential economic well-being of cities by encouraging local businesses and developers to create apps and solutions that can be used by policy makers and citizens alike – from tracking local bus services to issuing reports to reporting accidents or even developing infographics for easier understanding of complex data to offer direct information to citizens on how their tax money is being spent. This also assists in leveraging big data and enterprise-wide analytics to gain better inter-agency insight.
A key aspect of a smart city is interconnectivity and interoperability – of devices, processes and data, including sensitive personal data linked to each individual’s digital identity. Active public engagement is a key prerequisite for ensuring digital security for individuals. The extent to which cities will build data collection systems into the infrastructure – or just how much users will voluntarily gather and share information from their smartphones – has yet to be determined. Awareness about how to stay safe while surfing and navigating the cyber world needs to be emphasised and embedded into our consciousness on the same scale as ‘look on both sides before crossing the street’ instruction. On the flip side, citizens need to know and understand about their data that would be shared through different devices and processes, what the privacy norms are and what rights and privileges would user agencies – whether public or private – carry on usage of that data.
Active citizen engagement is not a new concept and has been in use by governments – with or without the aid of technologies – for many decades now. In the context of smart cities, it adds a technology dimension to an already complex domain of governance. In India where basic literacy itself is an issue, the problem is compounded by the multiplicity of languages and negligible digital literacy.
So how do we ensure that the marginalised and ‘under-heard’ sections of society are not further marginalised? Technical innovation alone will not provide a solution, because there are structural features – regulation, economics etc. – that mitigate the impact of technological change, while societal levers like behavior or perceptions are as or even more important. Democratisation of information will play a key role in expanding engagement in ways that draws new actors, interests and influence into government.
A new way of collaboration is emerging with the all-pervasive technologies that we use, with the attendant potential of a transformative role that such technologies can play. To do so in our cities – smart or not – community engagement is still relevant and the mix of digital knowledge and citizen activism is now needed more than ever.
