YOUR GUIDE TO THE FUTURE

Despite the wide adoption of the Smart City concept in our cities, the concept mostly remains obscure to the general public. This is due to the lack of clear definition of Smart City but also the often limited participation to the urban development by the public, including to a specific demographic groups, the children.

Urban parks can promote city dweller’s quality of life as it provides a medium for various social activities. It also beneficial for city dweller’s physical and mental health and improve the sense of community. Inhabitants of Anyang City in South Korea has a strong park-going culture, with a survey indicating that 75% of the respondents has more that one year experience of visiting the parks regularly.

Urban agriculture gains relevance as it not only provides direct benefit in food security but also has other embedded environmental benefits. A study investigated Rooftop Kitchen Garden (RTG) as one urban agriculture initiative to assess and quantify the benefit of the urban agriculture at household level in South Delhi, India.

Rapid rate of urbanisation in major cities have driven many governments struggling to provide various public services to the inhabitants. Thus, many city governments resort to reaching out to Social Enterprise to support the mobilising & dispensing of socio-economic resources.

Compared to conventional green roofs that only installed vegetation or other green infrastructure, multilayer green roofs are an innovative tool that combine the green infrastructure with blue infrastructure with a rainwater harvesting system.

Addressing complex urban challenges require innovative problem solving, including through co-creation of urban solution with Urban Living Labs (ULL). ULL function as meeting arenas to support communities’ diversity, significance and connectedness, where participants can experiment with practical ideas and solutions towards a more cohesive, inclusive and sustainable every-day life.

Smart Cities thrive where innovation is fully supported in the governance. Urban Living Labs (ULL) is one medium that can provide the supporting environment for innovation. Urban Living Labs uses co-creation or a process of value creation by sharing information, promotes iterative, nonlinear innovation processes.

Land commodification and housing marketisation as a result of industrialisation in Chinese cities have pushed many traditional villages out of the market to make room for more profitable high-rise development. Architect Wu Liangyong pushed back by using the organic renewal concept, to repair the traditional courtyard houses in the Ju’er Hutong project.

To overcome the deindustrialisation that affected many Italian cities in the late 1990s, city leaders and decision makers promotes new lifestyle and sustainable working model to encourages new economic competitiveness and urban quality. Adaptive reuse design strategy is actively adopted to preserve the physical and cultural heritage of abandoned building and industrial sites.

New demographic trends, changing households need and evolving home-ownership outlook has accelerated urban expansion in Europe to accommodate the citizens’ need. On the European policy level, major concerns regarding urban expansion and social integration became evident in the late 1980s through the “Green Paper on Urban Environment”, published by the European Commission.

China has strong restriction on urban expansion as the growing concern of farmland loss that threatens their food security. There are various ways that have been implemented in urban areas in China to limit land conversion to urban areas throughout the years. One example is the Quota System, that puts a cap on land conversion in terms of location, rime and construction purpose.

With rapid urbanisation, cities seem to expand their area to meet the needs of housing of the growing population. Yet, this urban expansion occasionally goes out of hand with oversupply of housing and depletion of green area that leads to various environmental deterioration.

Limiting urban development through legal and governmental approach is one way to control land expansion. Schiappacasse et al. (2021) introduces another approach that can not only hinder urban expansion but also promote social integration.

The City of Stockholm put significant weight in the improvement of their transformative capacity. This is ensured by the implementing measures that support the sustainability of their smart city agenda. For Stockholm, it is not only crucial to have a long-term vision but also that the goal is shared and democratically legitimised by a wide range of stakeholders.

In the development of Smart Cities, increasing the Transformative Capacity is critical to close the gap between planning and implementation of the Smart City goals. Transformative Capacity is the city government’s capacity to conceive, prepare, initiate, and perform cutting-edge urban changes.

Smart City thrive in a system that support collaboration and innovation. Yet, many smart cities still operate in a top-down governance structure that may limit the progress of development. One of the problem arise from the conventional governance structure is the gap between planning and implementation of smart city advancement.

Despite the strong top-down approach of smart city planning, Chinese Smart City successfully nurture the innovative and collaborative environment in their governance system by encouraging local municipality to adapt national strategic plan based on the local context.

Data collection through various sensors and monitors, and analysing them with the help of Artificial Intelligence can be a powerful system that Smart Cities use to understand the municipal needs in real time. However, without transparency and accountability of how the government use the data and process of the decision making, can be a hazard to democracy.

A side effect that may impose in creating more accessible and affordable digital platform for smart cities is the threat of privacy and safety of individual data. Thus, city government should put in place practices that strengthen the safety of people, their data and identity.

A successful initiative that improves digital literacy and bridge the digital gap is the Urban Governance Lab. This is medium that digital upskilling of the most marginalised, especially women, and young people who have a large demographic footprint within many countries and cities of the developing world.

Connecting the vulnerable social groups to the digital infrastructure and service can provide significant impact to the communities. Such as the case in Latin America, where grass-root network owned by locals jointly collaborate to provide affordable internet access to low-income groups that lacks the digital literacy and have no access to the information and technology.

To establish the sustainability of the equal digital governance initiative, mechanisms that city applies in the beginning must be coupled with recurring process of monitoring and evaluation to measure the progress. City shall appoint diverse external advisory team with key local actors.

To fully reap the benefits of Smart City development with the upgrade of technology and service provision, city government must address the issue of “digital divide” that may persist in the municipality. However, to bridge the digital gap of infrastructure and services, it cannot be handled by only one department or a single IT-agency.

To express their commitment to the promotion of human rights of digital access, The City of Barcelona establish the Institutional Declaration on Technological Humanism. This declaration not only fosters the value of equity in digital accessibility but also protects the citizen right and liberties in the digital space.

In achieving great quality of life in the city, connections to digital infrastructure and services are ubiquitous. Online services as well as offline public services must be coupled together to manage the urbanisation process and communication between local government and the residents.

Incentives and disincentives in Development Control can promote or discourage certain adaptation and mitigation objectives. In the long term it can encourage behavioural and investments towards climate-friendly urbanisation as opposed to the business-as-usual model of development that depletes our natural resources.

Whether they are premeditated or unintentional by the policy makers, in the process of land use and development control, there may be regulation or procedure that deter sustainable urban development. UN Habitat listed some of the most common in zoning law and urban management practice that incentivise the unsustainable city development.

Developing infrastructure and providing services for urban inhabitants require massive financial resources, including the aim to climate-proof the city. Through the study of numerous cities globally, UN Habitat provide examples that other cities can adopt to enhance municipal finance by generating diverse portfolio of income stream.

To ensure that new developments are located in appropriate locations, consistent with the urban design guidelines, have the necessary service and facilities, as well as consistent to the environmental protection; Development Control can become a powerful tool that urban planners use to manage city development.

Green spaces play a critical role in improving environmental quality in urban areas. It acts as a carbon sink that reduces the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, mitigating the Urban Heat Island Effect as well as reducing air pollution, providing shade/cooling, rainwater catchment and biodiversity support.