Thinking Cities Anew

Cities are a crucial part of modern civilization. Urban activities do create many problems as cities grow but they also offer solutions to many problems. Since cities differ from each other in many ways, they set out diverse strategizes to handle modern day challenges of urban habitations. In this edition, the cover story sheds light on the need for cities to find the right balance between modern-day technological adaptation and building sustainable climate-change-proof cities for making urban living experience better and future of cities safe.

The 21st Century has brought the digital revolution that has changed the world for good. The issue of climate change also began gaining prominence as we progressed in the new century. It is one of the crucial priority areas for urban habitations around the world. Cities of the world today are seeing the impacts of both, digital revolution and the impacts of climate change, in their daily operations and also on their future prospects. Some cities are smartly using digital technology to address the issue of climate change. Manchester City Council in the United Kingdom is one such city. The city has developed its Digital Strategy for the next five years in a way that is wrapped around its long-term vision of becoming a carbon neutral city by 2038. Back home in Mumbai, the city has come out with Mumbai Climate Action Plan to ensure that the city reduces its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to net zero by 2050.

Manchester Digital Strategy 2021 – 2026

The importance of integrating technology into service delivery and in running cities is becoming crucial. Understanding the significance, Manchester City Council has laid down its digital strategy for achieving multiple objectives. The strategy stands on four pillars—Smart People, Digital Places, Future Prosperity and Sustainable Resilience. The city council is confident that the strategy will aid their efforts to become a zero-carbon city by 2038.
The city has gone a step further in ensuring their citizens get benefits of smart city ecosystem and to do this, the efforts are on making people smarter. According to the strategy, “Smart People is about making sure that all our residents have access to the skills, training and employment opportunities that they need to participate fully in the life of the city and benefit from its many opportunities.” The city has charted a list of 11 priorities with a timeline. These priorities include digital inclusion, support under-represented groups, promote digital education from school level, include digital skills as priority in jobs, and encourage digital leadership among many others.
Another theme of the strategy is building ‘Digital Places’. “Digital Places is about making sure the city itself, alongside its people, drives us towards a more digitally enabled future.” These will define how public services are delivered to citizens. The basic premise of the strategy under this theme is all kinds of civic services shall be digitally accessible. And the services should be operated in a way that data collected is used to improve service delivery and also allow private players to use data productively without compromising on data ethics, security and privacy concerns. The strategy has laid out basic principles, which are: Privacy First, Open data and interfaces, Embrace open standards, Share where possible, Support modularity, and Accept social responsibility. The third theme ‘Future Prosperity’is closely related to first two themes. The objective of the works under this is to ensure that digital strategy makes a progressive impact on the lives of its residents by ensuring prosperity for all in a sustainable and ethical manner.
The fourth theme is about building Sustainable resilience. It is planned to help achieve Manchester’s commitment to become a zero-carbon city by 2038, and also face the problems evolving from climate change. For this, the city is planning to use digital technology to drive a green and inclusive economy, supporting the transition to a zero-carbon city.
In India, Pune has come out with a similar document titled ‘Rebooting Pune: City Digital Strategy- 2018-2020’ in February 2018. Kunal Kumar, then Commissioner of Pune Municipal Corporation, underlined the significance of the document, “The city digital strategy provides a three year action plan for Pune to become truly digital. The purpose of Digital Strategy is to set an agenda with clear goals before the city administration to provide digital ecosystem comprising Digital infrastructure, Digital services and cashless payment ecosystem, Digital platform for collaboration and Digital Enterprise to rank higher on reliability. It explores the ways in which technology can be used to innovate and find solutions to urban challenges faced by the city.” However, there are not many examples from any other cities which have developed digital strategy for developing a robust digital ecosystem. However, under the Smart Cities Mission, many cities are making efforts to use existing Integrated Control and Command Centres (ICCC) for leveraging the benefits of digital reforms in the country. A lot of the cities are still in the nascent stage and need handholding support for deciding the right trajectory of their digital journey. The experienced cities like Pune in India and other European cities can guide them.

National Urban
Digital Mission

About a year ago, Government of India launched National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM) to enhance the ease of living in our cities and towns leveraging IT & associated technologies and support the existing urban ecosystem systems in a ‘citizen-centric’ approach. NUDM aims to build the shared digital infrastructure that will strengthen the capacity of the urban ecosystem to solve complex problems at scale and speed. It is built as a public good and provides the ecosystem actors the foundational digital building blocks, ready-to-use platforms, standards, specifications, and frameworks. Under the mission, it has integrated multiple programs of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) that are targeted to improve digital operations of urban local bodies and of smart cities. India Urban Data Exchange and Smart Cities Open Data Portal are promoting cities to upload their data and create a robust digital ecosystem for cities in the country.
Right now, the NUDM is a work in progress but if cities can build their own ecosystems using the existing assistance from the central government and other cities, it can pave a new path for prosperity for cities because digital service provision is surely going to change the way ULBs deliver services to their citizens. The major problem right now is the scaling of the project as the objective cannot be achieved by just getting limited data sets from the select cities in the country where theurban population is spread over about 8000 small and big towns across the length and breadth of the country. Cities in India need to be proactive in developing their own digital strategy like Manchester and Pune. These strategies can be in line with the existing programs of the central and state government but assessing their own capacities, resources and local situation is crucial for fruition of desired objectives.

Mumbai Climate Action Plan

The Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP) was released recently and it laid down a 30-year strategic roadmap for achieving the target of net-zero Greenhouse Gas emission. The action plan details out the city’s long-term plan of mitigation and adaption strategies. The plan identifies as many as six areas—sustainable waste management, urban greening and biodiversity, urban flooding and water resource management, energy and buildings, air quality and sustainable mobility. The plan focuses on the challenges the city of Mumbai is currently facing or might face in the future based on its geographical, climatic conditions and changing environment.
Government of Maharashtra, and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) started the work on the Action Plan in August 2021. C40 Cities network and World Resources Institute India (WRI India) assisted in the preparation of the city’s Climate Action Plan (MCAP). ‘The Climate and Air Pollution Risks and Vulnerability Assessment’ highlights the city’s climate risk based on historic data. Highlighting the situation of Urban Heat in the country’s financial capital, the report says, the city has seen a warming trend since 1973 with an increase of 0.25°C per decade, with 200+ days annually classified as extreme caution events since the mid-90s. Dense settlements, low vegetation cover and reflective building materials increase the risk of heat exposure. The situation of Mumbai on urban flooding is quite obvious to all considering floods in recent years. Mumbai has recorded a steady increase in extreme rainfall events. Almost one-third of city’s population lives within a 250m radius buffer of BMC-reported flooding hotspots. The assessment was also done on risks of landslides, coastal risks and air pollution situation of the city. Based on the study, the Action Plan is drafted to ensure that the city that is home to over 20 million people becomes resilient for coming generations and develop an ecosystem that protects it from extreme weather or climate change-induced impacts.
A recent study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) indicates Maharashtra is the third most vulnerable state in India and Mumbai is one of five districts in Maharashtra most vulnerable to the compounded impacts of climate change. The Action Plan has presented a couple of scenarios under which GHG situation is forecasted. Mumbai has an overarching mitigation target of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. Interim and long-term targets include 30% emissions reduction by 2030, 44% by 2040 and net zero by 2050 against base year emissions (2019).

Way forward for cities

Cities are ever-evolving. They need to keep themselves updated to remain relevant and thriving. There is a need for cities to prosper and for that they have to adopt digital tools and technologies for upgrading their services and facilities. They have to provide their residents a suitable environment where they can connect with the world effortlessly
and conveniently.
Cities will keep attracting people because cities help people achieve their dreams. Cities need to be future-ready for businesses and aspiring citizens. And, at the same time, cities need to become strong to face the challenges evolving because of climate change and environmental degradation because of unabated and at times unregulated industrial and urban activities. In the new world, cities have to find a balance between the growth, prosperity and sustainability.