Industrial Revolution - Smart Cities

1. Introduction

Industrial Revolution has led to an increased migration into urban areas of the world, giving room for rapid urbanization in the past five decades. Today, more than 50% of the population habitat urban parts of the world and by the year 2050 this figure is predicted to be at 70% (Annexure 1: Trends in Urbanization). The figures can be related to the fact that urban dwellings offer better infrastructure and employment opportunities as compared to rural areas. Better education, standards of living and connect with other parts of the world also makes cities attractive for people to live in. Metropolitans are major contributors to any country’s economic activity. But urbanization should not only be observed as an economic and demographic phenomenon.

Cities are homes for numerous multinationals and these multinationals have increased energy requirements. These multinationals provide employment and thus contributing to increased disposable incomes of people and hence we can see a growth in demand of water, food, natural resources and vegetation. Thus resulting in an increased aggregate demand per capita and this has been giving rise to uneven distribution, allocation and access to resources.

Smart cities have been doing the moolah in our country and are regarded as a first step towards making India a developed economy. Building smart cities would result into more migration from rural to urban India aggravating the above ecological sustainability issues. Hence a smart city has to be “smart” in its truest sense and be built by taking into consideration a long term sustainability. (Annexure 2: What is a smart sustainable city?)

1. Why Urban Sustainability Is Important?

The facts why urbanization has been exponentially increasing post industrial revolution, have already been highlighted. Increased population densities have increased the amount of human load cities can carry. This human load is defined by a term Carrying Capacity which means “without disturbing the productivity of a habitat, the amount of population that can be handled by that habitat” [19]. This carrying capacity has led to increased ecological footprints and the urban landscape are already facing resource scarcity and for their sustainability cities are being dependent on hinterlands and surrounding ecosystems. Exploitation of surrounding ecosystem for the growth of cities results in Sustainability Gap.

This report aims at evaluating areas where technology can be made use of in order to develop and plan cities of future. Report’s primary agenda is to look out for where the city planning has failed to be able to deliver towards sustainable lifestyle and how can these issues be addressed going forward. Though there are other areas like income differences and unemployment which fall under the realms of urban planning have not been incorporated in the report. One other sector which does not completely fall under urban habitats is Agriculture and this also have not been addressed in the report.