Exploring the Politico-Cultural Dimensions for Development of Smart Cities in India

Abstract

Abstract:Indian cities seem to be in transition regardless of the various sustainability challenges they have experienced in recent years. Globalization, market economy, and technological developments have brought economic, social and infrastructural advantages. However, population growth, proliferation of urban functions, insurmountable increase in size of cities, and environmental crises because of climate change have caused the cities to experience severe spatial, infrastructural and environmental ailments. Besides, the significant rise of Information Communication Technology (ICT) industries in the cities and their socio-economic and spatial influence have brought about inequitable development. At this juncture emancipation of a political will to build smart cities in India provides a new impetus for changing the planning perspectives and warrants a politico-cultural discourse to examine the prerequisites and paradigms, which could aid in development of smart cities in India. Drawing upon the stimulating mix of past experiences and prospective approaches across the world and discussions with experts in the political science, local governance and urban development, this explorative paper provides a discourse on the concept of smart cities, opportunities, challenges and the way forward to realize the goals of smart city development in a heterogeneous but democratically unified country like India. Based on the discourse, it is argued that the current urban governance system is not congruent for development of smart cities in India. Therefore, it is advocated that a cultural theory inspired politico-cultural mechanism be explored and crafted to assemble the requisite elements of an urban governance system that should enable the dynamics and cohesion needed for developing smart cities in India.

Exploring the Symbiotic Relationship between Digital Transformation, Infrastructure, Service Delivery, and Governance for Smart Sustainable Cities

“…One prioritizes specialized cities with ICT connectivity, sustainable infrastructure, and advanced transportation to foster entrepreneurship and economic activities [10,16,48,54]. The second model focuses on improving existing cities by enhancing infrastructure, services, transportation, environmental sustainability, and overall quality of life, emphasizing ICT connectivity, energy efficiency, an entrepreneurial ecosystem, aesthetic urban environments, and participatory governance [9,10,48,55].…”

“…This integration enables real-time precision in managing functions, processes, and engagements, resulting in enhanced economic efficiency, improved environmental sustainability, enhanced quality of life, effective service delivery, and distinctive urban images [32,[56][57][58]. Moreover, smart cities are governed by participatory and inclusive governance models [9,14,[16][17][18]33,55,59].…”

“…On the other hand, infrastructure, service delivery, and governance all enabled and managed by digital technology are pivotal for smart cities. Despite the environmental and social sustainability challenges of smart cities [37][38][39], infrastructure, service delivery, governance, and digital technology contribute to both the sustainability and smartness of the cities [9,10,16,32,48,54,55,67,68]. Therefore, in this framework, it was considered that city infrastructure serves as the backbone, influencing socio-economic functions and impacting the environment.…”

Design of a Smart Visiting Service Management System for Personal Information Collection in Order to Integrate Tourism Management into an Isolated Island

“…There are also some reports related to cultural and political tradition to personal information in the literature. Das [14] argued that the smart city management ways will be different based on various urban governance systems, infrastructure monitoring, and smart services. Wang et al [15] investigated the issue of consumer intentions to disclose personal information via mobile applications.…”

The Citipreneur

“…Local governments are facing sustainability challenges (e.g. climate change, socio-economic inequality, multicultural tensions, ecological degradation) and increasing public demands for improved services while state resources are shrinking (Sampson, 2017;Das, 2017;Johansson, 2018;Peyroux et al, 2013). Addressing these urban issues fits municipalities' permanent quest for public value creation targeting societal results collectively desired by the public.…”