SMART CITIES AND SUSTAINABLE URBANISM: A STUDY FROM POLICY AND DESIGN PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This paper examines India’s foray into building hundred smart cities from multiple perspectives viz. urban challenges, urban policies, sustainable urbanism, emerging global models and design and technology intervention. It also evaluates the relative challenges of building new smart cities like Masdar or Songdo and applying smart interventions to retrofit the aging and ailing urban infrastructure of the existing Indian cities. Based on the data from the secondary sources it examines the priority areas and the possibilities of making smart intervention through use of appropriate technology and design. While doing so, it brings into discussion India’s urban challenges and its policy of urban development over the years besides the recurring development deficit. Today, Indian cities are faced with huge infrastructure deficit which reflects in their performance and service delivery. The imperative to ensure urban rejuvenation now reflects in the recent policy of creating hundred smart cities in India. This paper also discusses howtechnology and design interventions at appropriate levels canaugment urban infrastructure and make a sustainable urban eco-system called smart city.