Three Pre-requisites for Transformation of Smart Cities in 2017

Harsh Marwah, Country Manager, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, India

We live in a tech-savvy, digital world, where smart living is increasingly becoming a part of our lifestyle. India is rapidly moving towards the digital age and era of smart cities. The overlaying of information technology on urban infrastructure, can enhance citizen services in various ways. India’s smart city mission is meant to ensure core infrastructure and improvements in the quality of life in approximately 500 metropolitan areas. Below mentioned are three key trends that are essential for smart cities that will turn the country into a superpower.

1. Smart cities will hit a tipping point

When we think about smart cities, we visualize them as flying cars and huge skyscrapers, but it’s more of a daily reality rather than visualization of the future. This is possible only because the cities we live in have evolved to the point where we can actually deploy technologies at a large scale and enjoy the benefits.

As a developing country, India has a lot of potential to execute plans for smart cities. The Government of India is working towards the building of the same. Some cities such as Pune, Surat, Vishakhapatnam and Chennai have already begun to see drastic changes in terms of modernization. These deployments could be everything and anything from energy solutions—such as lighting, renewable source of energy, e-governance and citizen engagement. Citizen engagement tries to create methodologies and leverage technologies that create more positive real-time conversations between the government and the citizens.

2. Humanizing the technology around smart communities

Another trending idea is cities focusing on technology for economic development and innovation. The goal is to provide the citizens with an open environment, relevant information at their fingertips and help them create solutions for their own communities.

When the topic of citizen engagement arises, it is necessary to have a more modern way of having conversations between community members. For example, if you're thinking about making changes within your community, the traditional way to get that done is by writing petitions and get signatures or laying out thoughts at a general body meeting. These methods of citizen engagement are now outdated. What we're looking at here is to create more contemporary, real-time scenario of creating conversations and events for community members to develop and improve the society around them. It really is only when you start to humanize technology that you get adoption, and until you get adoption, technology doesn't get utilized in the manner that benefits the society in the way that we think that it can.

3. It takes a village to develop a smart community

There needs to be teamwork that exist among all the players of the society to truly implement these solutions among the masses. This collaboration is going to be very different from the way it's been done in the past, where you have more of a vendor-customer type relationship. A collective effort is needed to develop a smart community, and various different players, from city officials and large-scale partners, to the nonprofits, universities, and other technology vendors, everybody needs to work in sync with each other to create a public-private environment. If any one party tries to do it all by themselves, that will stifle innovation.

It's only when we all start working together, and understand where one group picks up and the other one drops off, we can drive adoption and utilization together. By pulling the best out of each one of us, we're really going to see smart communities take off.