In Maharashtra, a township that is spread over 10,000 acres is being developed with the objective of striking a balance between cosmopolitan architecture and environmentally friendly surroundings. The master plan has already won the Award for Excellence 2005, given by the Congress for New Urbanism (USA) and the American Society of Landscape Architects Award, 2005. One of the salient features of this city is the use of GIS technology at the earliest possible stages of design, planning, and construction.
The Indian government, in its 10 point agenda, has emphasised on infrastructure development. Providing excellent infrastructure—modern, clean and sustainable cities; a cutting-edge railway network; new age ports; good roads, 24×7 electricity and water is a top priority for the government. Owing to rapid urbanisation and the growing population, our metros and tier 1 cities are already under significant ‘resource’ pressure. However, this is also a tremendous opportunity for cities like Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Visakhapatnam, Surat, Pune, Ludhiana, who have emerged as destinations for doing business.
India must ensure that it nurtures cities that are not only planned for today, but future-proofed against tomorrow’s vagaries. The second class of cities must be able to provide proper water supply, sanitation, and storm water harvesting, be able to treat and dispose waste, manage solid and hazardous wastes, and supply safe food, water and housing to citizens.
While the intent is clearly in the right direction, driving such a large scale initiative is quite challenging. Building a new city could take anywhere between 20-30 years and involves a multitude of participants working together in the smart city ecosystem. For any process of such a complexity, common guiding vision and iterative planning and execution are highly imperative. An equally important aspect is deployment of a common technology platform, since the beginning, which is capable of integrating all aspects of smart city ecosystem and various stakeholders of city development and planning.
Location is a common denominator in every aspect of smart city and hence a location platform, that is, a GIS based platform technology has to form this backbone since the very beginning including ICT planning and deployment. A centralised information system based on GIS provides an IT framework which integrates every aspect of a smart city—starting from conceptualisation, planning, and development to maintenance.
Designing our living spaces
GIS can help increase city’s sustainability by reducing energy and water use, finding better waste disposal, and decreasing a building’s carbon footprint. By managing information both inside and outside buildings down to the asset level, GIS can help in differentiating the environmental impact of development, planning and evaluating neighbourhood patterns and design, estimate the ‘walkability’ for LEED-ND projects based data on streets, pedestrian routes, bicycle routes, transit accessibility, building entrances, and a variety of other factors.
Smart utilities
GIS helps utilities to manage and map the location of millions of miles of overhead and underground circuits. Within GIS, utility assets can be linked directly to customer information system, allowing proactively monitoring of work orders and outages. GIS also enables utilities to identify vulnerabilities that cause outages, weigh asset investments, and better understand customer satisfaction.
Streamlining the urban commute
Multi-modal transportation, intelligent traffic and transportation management systems that use analytics to provide efficient solutions to ease commuting are key is an efficient smart city. GIS supports the end-to-end transportation infrastructure life cycle from information to planning process which can be brought into the design process and easily carried over into other areas such as as-built drawings, operations, and maintenance.
Smart public works
Increasing number of PWDs now rely on GIS platform to integrate their dissimilar systems. The resultant synergy supports a dynamic system that allows the PWDs to function smoothly across its full range of responsibilities including roadways inventories, water system optimisation, solid waste disposal, fleet management and infrastructure construction and maintenance.
Citizen engagement
Adding citizens to vast network of sensors, cameras, smart meters and other data-collection systems gives government a more detailed understanding of a community. Inputs can be automatically fed into a GIS to help agencies improve processes and analyses. Web and mobile apps can allow government organisations to receive immediate feedback from citizens including reports of incidents, suggestions and general comments.
Safe and secure cities
In the aftermath of a disaster, GIS aids local, state and federal agencies with technology that supports collaboration between multiple organisations. Data captured with mobile GIS provides the ability to add updates from remote locations for more efficient incident management. It also supplies rapid damage assessment and more accurate recovery operations.
A shield against crime
With GIS technologies, law enforcement can now plot crime, both in terms of time and place. This allows investigators to better analyse the data and
determine patterns of criminal behaviour within the city. The city of Minneapolis, USA, for instance, has combined data sets with locations of liquor stores, public libraries, public parks, and bus route locations to better identify patterns of gun-related crimes, including robberies, shootings, gun- theft and illegal possession.
Similarly, in the city of Arlington, Texas, the police have successfully mapped building code violations along with the locations of residential break-ins to better anticipate new burglary hotspots.
Shining examples in India
Another example is Gujarat International Finance Tech (GIFT) city in Gujarat where GIS has been used in benchmarking of master plan, 3D visualisation for urban skyline, geometric network of power utility and landscape management. GIS is being used in real time monitoring of developmental issues related to distortion and deviation while executing various utility services. Also, CCTV live feed to the GIS software helps in security surveillance.
The largest consumer of GIS applications and its e-governance initiatives are the central and state governments. GIS has the power to transform cities, and through them, the lives of ordinary people. It can help build smarter, connected and new age cities that are more sustainable and citizen-centric.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Agendra Kumar
Quelle/Source: The Financial Express, 05.04.2015
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