Revisiting the concept of smart cities in the indian context” – lessons from contemporary sustainable urban growth theories

Abstract

This paper broadly aims at understanding the concept of smart city movement and development from Indian perspective. An attempt is made to review and understand the concept and definitions of smart cities in India and other foreign nations especially in the European countries in a comparative manner. Smart city movement is similar to sustainability movement. The concept of smart city aims at improving the efficiency based on intelligent management, integrated ICTs and active citizen participation. The broad components of smart city mainly include: Smart Economy, Smart Environment, Smart Governance, Smart Living, Smart Mobility and Smart People. By and large, smart city concept believes in applying Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to improve the efficiency of cities. Promoting smart cities is about rethinking cities as inclusive, integrated, and livable." In this paper, author makes an attempt to carry out comparative empirical study of contemporary sustainable urban growth theories mainly Smart growth, Compact city, New Urbanism and Transit Oriented development (TOD) principles. Suitable lessons are drawn from the comparative study and on the contrary author argues that, smart city movement complements sustainable development and it can be treated as refined and extended version of contemporary sustainable urban growth theories. In conclusion author states that, smart growth, new urbanism, compact city and TOD principles act as pre-requisite for sustainable urban planning and creating fundamental framework for smart city movement. The efficiency of the smart cities cannot be enhanced without considering and adopting principles of contemporary sustainable urban growth theories. Smart cities and contemporary sustainable urban growth theories complement each other in creating sustainable environment and in no way, the term smart city replaces the words smart growth, new urbanism, compact city and TOD.