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“The citizen voice can be pivotal in providing the demand-side pressure on government, service providers and organizations…  …to encourage full and swift response to citizen needs” (Jim Yong Kim, World Bank President)

 

Cities are engines for economic growth, innovation and change. Throughout human history, the greatest civilizations were centered around cities rather than nations, facilitating the flourishing of trade, sciences and the arts- things which have come to shape entire national identities today. It’s for these opportunities of economic, cultural, intellectual and social development that urban societies have boomed in the developed world and people continue to leave their agrarian rural life to move to settle in cities across the developing world, even today.

 

The greatest advantage cities provide is the efficient utilization of resources- human, capital, land, water and others- to achieve liveability objectives and also monetize the resources. The essence of the smart city concept is to achieve ‘more for less’.  The proliferation of technology in the form of smartphones and super-fast wireless connectivity over the past decade has made it possible to give a technological angle to normal urban products and services.

 

While across the developing world, cities still face basic requirements in the nature of increased or improved water and electricity supply, roads and transportation options, cities in the developed world are using modern information and communication technologies to give existing infrastructure and services a ‘shot in the arm’ by bringing about improved accountability, flexibility and real-time management.  So, developments in smart cities can be viewed as using technology for either improvising the functioning of existing infrastructure and services as in the developed world, or for development of new infrastructure and services, with technology and efficiency incorporated into the design aspects itself, as is possible now in the developing world.

 

Technology also provides a new dimension to urban development, which has often been overlooked by government, businesses and municipal bodies- the engagement and participation of citizens. As cities grow, they tend to cluster into districts with each having its own identity, cultural dimension and character. These factors play a big part in the provision and appreciation of infrastructure and services. For example, if the majority of citizens in a city district oppose the development of overhead electricity transmission lines for safety or aesthetic reasons, and reach consensus on a solution to share private land with government to construct underground electricity cables, then it makes perfect sense to take those perceptions and consensus into account. While citizen groups in city districts have always existed and together voiced their opinions to the municipal body or mayor, it has often been the prerogative of a select group of mostly elderly men, who handled those issues. Technology today provides the opportunity to connect citizens of all age groups and gender in a particular district or the entire urban area for that matter, to voice their opinions on proposed development projects through the medium of city wide or district wide apps or web-based portals. This gives a democratic legitimacy and sense of ownership to citizens in their respective neighborhoods- a feeling that often culminates into pride and responsibility.

 

Citizen engagement through virtual interaction, dialogue and discussion is therefore, central to urban development in the age of smartphones and digital technology. The need for active, engaged citizens can be felt when considered from the following viewpoints:

 

• Empowerment: Citizen groups know best what their respective communities need. If they feel that through technology, their voices will be heard and taken into consideration as an important aspect in the development planning stage, then they will be encouraged to proactively use such media to bring to attention local issues and provide suggestions for solutions.  More importantly, it will make sure that the economically, socially or physically disadvantaged citizens get a voice and development projects are inclusive of these disadvantaged sections.

 

• Collaborative Development: Social media and city-wide apps provide opportunities for collective brainstorming and innovation to achieve development objectives. A robust ICT framework and an active and receptive civil society or municipal body can encourage talented citizens (who normally wouldn’t care to get involved) to ideate and come up with out-of-the-box propositions. Also, procurement and resource utilization will involve local supply chains and validated by citizens. All such efforts will lead to creating a buzz around development projects among the citizenry, leading to investment of ‘social capital’ into urban development.

 

• Awareness Creation: While citizens being encouraged to participate in the development of their localities is one of the objectives of smart development, technology can also work the other way around to make citizens more informative about developmental aspects and global trends and best practices. This can be enabled through regular feeds of snippets  of information to citizens who subscribe to a city-wide app or social media pages of the city or localities. The benefits of smart cites need to be understood by citizens to be appreciated and foster collaboration between them and the municipal bodies.

 

• Open Data: Citizens need to be able to access data about facilities and planned developments in their localities to validate or contribute to the same or simply to cater to their ‘right to know’. This calls for robust data collection and management systems working on real-time basis. Data needs to be shared unhindered between city-wide organizations and departments (public and private) for a more holistic and justifiable open data framework, which provides actionable data. However, care must be taken to incorporate privacy in the setup so that data can be accessed safely and integrity of the system is not compromised. After all, the government/municipal body is the custodian of the data and they are responsible for regulating its access and usage.

 

• Service Provisions: Normal urban services like paying electricity, water and cellphone bills, parking fees, finding directions or information about history or restaurants etc. in a particular locality can be enabled through digital kiosks. These can be designed by taking into account locality-based or pan-city suggestions for features to be incorporated, including RFID smart cards or card-based payment facilities.

 

In practice, citizen engagement can be responsible for facilities like:

• 1. Geospatial and photographic reporting on the cleanliness of roads, parks and public toilets. Also, community wide weekly, bi-weekly or monthly plans to jointly clean up local communities.
• 2. Encouraging maximum use of public transport over private commuting.
• 3. Ensuring government entitlements reach the people and grievances are addressed within hours and not days.
• 4. Engage people to use apps to report incidents of corruption in the government and private sector.
• 5. Inculcate the idea of ownership among citizens for their environment, green cover and public spaces to discourage littering, vandalism and encroachment and encourage protection of historical and cultural spaces.
• 6. Motivate the public to become citizen police and take on the responsibility of making their city safer.

 

Some initiatives undertaken for citizen engagement in India are:

 

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT INITIATIVES
Karnataka One (www.karnatakaone.gov.in)	Through this platform, a citizen can pay phone bills from all service providers (Airtel, Vodafone, MTS,  Idea etc.)
	Citizens can also avail themselves of the services of 25 government facilities ranging from the electricity and telephone department to state transport, Bangalore University and even the police department.
Smart City Vadodara (https://vmc.gov.in/smartcityvmc)	GPS-enabled app allows people in the city to raise issues by posting a message or sharing a photograph related to mismanagement of waste, dysfunctional city lights, an open drain, stray or dead dogs, fallen trees, encroachment on roads and even food adulteration.
	Also allows for filing taxes, applying for tenders and checking for government job vacancies.
GIS@school, Madhya Pradesh government (www.educationportal.mp.gov.in/GIS)	Portal for school education through which students and teachers can update the status of their schools and facilities provided in the school
	Information related to the availability of drinking water and separate toilets for boys and girls to teachers’ attendance can all be updated through this app, which aims to make governments schools and teachers more accountable.
My City My Pride, Bhubaneswar (http://mycitymypride.org)	Mobile app and website allows citizens to view the status of their complaints, learn about other issues in their locality and get attention from the authorities without any delay.
Safecity.in, RED DOT FOUNDATION)	Platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data, which maybe anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. The idea is to make this data useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to identify factors that causes behavior that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions.

 

References:

 

1. Manifesto on Citizen Engagement, Market Place of the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities
2. Manzar, Osama, Citizen engagement makes a city smart, not infrastructure, Live Mint (published on 10 Jul 2016)

 

 

collaborative development Open data Smart city Citizen engagement urban development Municipal bodies Virtual interaction