|
Getting Smart About Sustainability T he new urban policies being promoted by the Government of India emphasise the use of smart technologies for creating effective and integrated plans for cities within their regional footprints and for enhancing efficiencies in the operation and management of municipal services with serious regard to savingenergy and water, maximum recycling of waste and production and use of renewable energy. The use of advanced technologies for information and communication, measurement, automation and suchlike will enable a paradigm shift in the way we plan and manage our cities in order to make them inclusive, productive and resilient. The mantra of smartness will apply across the board, not only to the programme for Smart Cities which envisages the improvement of 100 satellite towns and mid-size cities, but also the Urban Development Mission targeting the provision of drinking water, sewerage and waste management in 500 cities, the mission to deliver ‘Housing for All’ by 2022, the Total Sanitation Mission (Swacch Bharat) by 2019 and the HRIDAY (Soul) scheme to rejuvenate heritage cities starting with six pilgrimage centres of different spiritual communities.
Sustainability is not a mere attribute of smart cities. Rather, it is a particular rationality that must be embedded in the planning for smart cities. Thinking about sustainability would be most effective if it is articulated in terms used by the Bruntland Commission in 1987. Sustainability has to be understood as a legacy for future generations, such that our actions today do not prevent our children from achieving their goals and ambitions tomorrow. It is a responsibility that must be exercised today. The discourse about sustainable cities has often been framed as achieving the reduction of carbon-intensive development and mitigating the deleterious impacts of cities on the climate. It is significant that this discourse is now advancing the notion of adaptation, because it highlights the potential for growing economies to be innovative in their responses to climate change and depletion of natural resources. Indian cities will continue to consumenatural resources at a staggering scale. What they produce is wealth, which is an outcome of the concentration of productive populations and the economies of scale achieved through that concentration. Spatial compactness must be an attribute of smart cities. The deployment of that wealth to produce innovative solutions is likely to be the most effective way to deal with the expanding footprints of Indian cities, their dependence on an ever-larger resource base for water, energy, material and food. The primary act in the process of adaptation must be integrated planning. As large civic entities that must abide by the ethos of collective decision-making – which is why they are the cradles of civilization –cities are by nature the outcomes of a deliberative process. Ad hoc, expeditious and tendentious decisions are inherently damaging to the urban ecosystem, thus demanding that cities as wilful collectives plan themselves efficiently and ensure the means of their own survival and the survival of future generations. The result of improved and integrated planning will be the city as an agglomeration of assets rather than liabilities and these assets – built environment, infrastructure, natural heritage are the means to ensure sustainability. Smart cities in India will be the result of smart planning and adaptation and innovation will be the necessary conditions for that smartness to psrevail and produce desirable outcomes. The simultaneous representation of all the realms of human endeavour, the integration of interventions across all social and techno-economic domains, the mandatory use of geo-spatial mapping as the base for planning and the harnessing of intelligence produced from combining maps and big data - these are the means to achieve sustainable cities. Ultimately, we are called upon to deliver a quality that is measurable only by outcomes but is itself quite ephemeral - the quality that derives from the ethos of maximum utility and zero waste. The sustainability of India’s cities will be the result of more accurate ways of seeing the world and shaping it as per our designs, without losing or damaging the sublime beauty that has been bequeathed by nature. q Jagan Shah
|