8/5/13 GIS for intelligent cities of the future

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GIS for intelligent cities of the future

S. Raghavendran
Pix e l Infote k Pvt Ltd.
#6, DNR Layout, PG Halli, Bangalore - 560 020
PH: +91-80-3460645/3349885, FAX: +91-80-3315474
raghave ndran@pix e linfote k .com , raghave ndran@re diffm ail.com

Introduction
On January 26,2001 the earth shook. Within minutes, vast areas in Gujarat were laid waste. Tall concrete
buildings, ancient heritage structures that once stood majestically sank into the ground, burying thousands
alive and leaving many of them injured or permanently disabled - an act of nature though unavoidable could
have been minimized had building regulations been followed, particularly in the cities.

The attack on the World Trade Center towers that brought about the death of an icon of the most powerful
city of the world has put forward a topic for debate before the countries of the third world: Fortifying the
metros: " Planning for Fear? ".

Cities are in transition. Within a generation the majority of the developing world's population will live in urban
areas and the number of urban residents in developing countries will increase by 2.5 billion - the current
urban population of the entire world. This rapid pace of urbanization is inescapable and irreversible.

The cities are the world's future. Cities of the 21st century while exhibiting the comfort and sophistication of
an international economy and culture - thanks to the "globalization" mantra; have been ignoring the harsh
realities, problems and paradoxical situations confronting them, more often trying to hide them under the
carpets.

The rapid pace of urbanization has outpaced the abilities and resources of city administrators and planners
to maintain adequate provision of services - The result: Infinite strain on the finite resources of the earth. The
perils: overcrowding, congestion, shortage of housing, escalating land prices, slums & squatter settlements,
degrading quality of life, environmental hazards and so on…

The day-to-day city life of an urbanite in any metropolis of our country has become unpredictable. In India
despite all the efforts of our planning agencies, urbanization has not taken the desired direction. The rules of
nature are overturned. One need not wonder if the dress code of the Urban Man of the 21st Century shown
in the picture becomes a mandatory one for mere survival.

If this is the quality of life that our urban planning has been offering to our fellow urbanites in different metros
of the world and if the present approach were to continue then our numbness, our silence, our lack of
outrage in addressing this key problem, would mean ending up with monitoring humans as an extinct
species.

Is there no way out to save our fellow citizens from the so-called veritable gas chambers and concrete
jungles of the world? With the tremendous advancements in information technology offering a helping hand
to several acute problems in diversified fields, including urban planning, the urban planners and city
managers have started realising the mammoth potential of IT especially Geographical Information System
(GIS) as a promising tool for Urban Planning.

The objective of this paper is to create awareness on the need to plan for Intelligent Cities where the City is
not just planned and managed efficiently but also intelligently using GIS.

Intelligent City makes interdependent relationships more concrete and dynamic. Resource allocation will

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become more efficient as implementation of comprehensive planning becomes more tangible. Rather than
existing largely as a separate and distinct function which is called upon during times of crisis as it is today,
emergency management will become integrated into every facet of municipal planning and operations.

Urban Planning and GIS - An Overview

"Planning is a future-oriented activity" that links scientific and technical knowledge to actions in the public
domain. It happens through a public discourse between all groups and individuals interested in and/or
affected by urban development and management activities pursued by the public or private sector. Urban
and regional planning agencies are rich and dynamic arenas where many societal problems and solutions
are explored and addressed in a direct and tangible way. Planning-related decisions are made daily through
a complex, often politically charged process involving plurality of interests. Moreover, the implementation of
those decisions makes a long-term imprint on the urban structure, functionality, and quality of life in urban
environments. Planners have always sought tools to enhance their analytical, problem-solving, and decision-
making capability. Adoption of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a more recent manifestation of the
same effort to incorporate new tools and technologies.

GIS touches all our lives, everyday

During the last three decades, a powerful technology has quietly changed the way people view and live in
their neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Most people remain unaware of GIS and its impact-an impact that is
as far-ranging as it is useful-despite GIS having grown immensely in the last 15 years, despite hundreds of
thousands of people now using the technology, and despite it affecting the daily lives of millions.

Let us take a look at our daily life and see how GIS helps us in ways that we never expected.

The clock radio rings at 6:00 a.m. You get up and turn on the lights: The lights are powered by
electricity and GIS is the tool that is used to manage the complex power infrastructure consisting of tens of
thousands of miles of transmission and distribution lines and hundreds of thousands of utility poles.

In the kitchen you pour some fresh fruit juice: These fruit trees are grown from the water supplied by the
Irrigation department, which in turn uses GIS for irrigation and water resources management.

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You take our daily shower in the bathroom: The water that we use to take bath is supplied through
water mains running crisscross across the city and maintained by the Water Supply department, which
again uses GIS for customer service, emergency response, water distribution, infrastructure maintenance,
automated mapping, flow analysis, and other aspects of engineering, operations, administration, and
finance.

You complete our daily chores: The wastewater so generated goes into the wastewater collection
system consisting of hundreds of miles of sanitary sewers and storm drains, which uses GIS in tandem with
its water delivery system.

You pick up the morning newspaper to browse the headlines: Wood from the trees is used to make
these newspapers. Here again GIS is involved for sound forest management practices. The newspaper
circulation department also uses GIS to understand the dynamics & demographics of carrier routes and
study circulation, to improve its business: Business Geography.

You drive to work: The roads are safer because of GIS. The community uses GIS for managing its
transportation infrastructure. GIS is used to support planning, inventory, design, construction, operations,
and maintenance. Moreover more than 80 percent of the information used to manage road, rail, and port
facilities have a spatial component.

You get phone calls from the clients in the office: GIS technology assists telecom companies in better
tracking the location and characteristics of their infrastructure, improving access to information when
engineering new projects, improving the ability to plan for additional capacity by forecasting future growth,
optimizing coverage of their mobile networks etc.

You receive a package by courier: GIS solutions for transportation fleet and logistics management exist
in the areas of routing, customer service, crew management, street and rail network management, and
vehicle/depot management. Knowing where a vehicle, pickup, or delivery is at any given time leverages
assets for optimum deployment and cost savings.

You leave office at noon, to go to the beach: GIS is used for the management of coastal resources
including shoreline, aquatic, and terrestrial habitats and biological resources; the distribution of threatened
and endangered species.

On the way home, you stop at a fast-food restaurant: The restaurant is at that particular location
because GIS helped to define the right store mix for the location's potential customers.

When you return back home, All is Well and things are safe: Communities are showing that GIS is
helping to reduce crime, providing an intelligence tool that plots and tracks all crimes.

It's been a long day, but you are finally home safe and sound. GIS has been there nearly every step of the
way, helping make life more comfortable and safe. All through the power of GIS.

The Emergence of Intelligent Cities

In the hundred years or so since its introduction, the automobile fundamentally changed the world. Its
effects can be seen having shaped both cities and institutions. Similarly, technologies like GIS, which are
still in their genesis, will, over time, have impacts of equal or greater magnitude, reshaping our cities. The
field of cybernetics holds the key to the Intelligent City. Cybernetics has the ability to synthesize and
simulate intelligent systems and can provide the means for improving planning, decision-making and
problem-solving processes, in some cases automating them. The total system will be dynamic, where
various subsystems can adjust as required to maximize the well being of the whole system. Real-time
modeling will occur whereby subsystems can run "what ifs" and then feed the results to a central processor
which compares all subsystem results and passes either positive or negative feedback to subsystems. The
desired results of one subsystem will thus be in relation to all other subsystems affected.

Intelligent city as an organism

To better understand the concept of the Intelligent City, it is helpful to draw an analogy with the natural
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world. With billions of years to equilibrate and optimize, natural systems are a superior model for perfecting
manmade systems. The Intelligent City will, in many respects, operate very much like an organism,
monitoring its various component systems and responding accordingly to potential or actual changes of
state in order to maintain equilibrium. As conditions favouring disaster are detected, the Intelligent City will
respond accordingly, heightening readiness as appropriate. The Intelligent City will assimilate knowledge of
hazards and implement hazard mitigation as an integral component of its overall functionality. As feedback
processes are built into the Intelligent City, the system will learn from its mistakes and improvements will
occur. The vulnerability of man's artificial environment exists today because of the absence of an effective
communication and control system, creating a permanent condition of asymmetry which leaves society
open to disasters. As telecommunication and technologies like GIS are used to interconnect all municipal
subsystems, the city's nervous system will be in place and a condition of equilibrium will be defined. If we
view the Intelligent City like an organism, experiencing countless actions and reactions, we can see that
unless these actions and reactions are intelligently managed and coordinated, then the system experiences
chaos and crisis - which every city of the world is facing today in one way or the other. The Intelligent City
will incorporate each of the elements of crisis management (Preparedness, Response, Recovery and
Mitigation) into its overall planning and operational matrix.

Intelligent Cities and GIS

It is not that efforts have not been made for planning an "Intelligent City: GIS, The City and The Planner" but
it is the same old traditional approaches and techniques that have turned out be obsolete, still being used
for planning the cities of the 21st century.

In the words of Aristotle " A City should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness". True to this,
Intelligent Cities are cities that are sustainable to the present and future demands of the city providing its
inhabitants security and happiness while adopting planning tools & practices suited to the local
requirements. Different cities are faced with different challenges and complexities peculiar to them and their
stage of development. Information is the glue binding us together in cities. Monitoring the city for key urban
indicators can help an Urban Planner to plan effectively and efficiently.

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To make a quick decision a planner requires authenticated and accurate data and a proper computer aided
tool (GIS), which will incorporate & analyze data with auxiliary information and spatial information faster for
the decision making. In brief an Intelligent City would be:

An Accessible City
A Business City
An Attractive City and
A City for Living

An Accessible City
The provision of efficient and effective infrastructure remains a challenge and an elusive goal to many cities.
GIS can be a helping hand in the making of an accessible city.

An Business City
Cities that are likely to thrive in the IT-based economy are those that are able to take advantage of the
information superhighway to forge new economic and cultural ties with other cities regardless of their size
and geographical location. In countries like Singapore, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has
identified science and technology corridors in the city.

An Attractive City
It is important for an Intelligent City to be attractive. One of the undesirable aspects of rapid urbanization is
the tendency for cities to look alike. Many urban environments, although functional, are harsh concrete
jungles with uninviting public spaces. Some cities have managed to counter this by enhancing their sense of
identity through their cultural and built heritage, open spaces and environmental conservation.

A City for Living

Last, but not least, an Intelligent City must be one that provides a conducive living environment for its
people. Having a home and a sense of community are intimately connected to the well being of any city and
its citizens. GIS can not only provide the planners with tools for managing the existing infrastructure but
also tools to plan for augmenting the existing infrastructure to cope up for the increased demand due to
rapid pace of urbanization. Moreover GIS has already been helping various departments in locating new
resources of various nature be it ground water or gold.

GIS: sky is the limit?

The endless list of application areas in GIS suggests that GIS can be a promising tool to the urban planners
in finding the solutions to the problems confronting them today and in building Intelligent Cities. In a country
like India, where even preparing a Base Map takes away considerable portion of the planners resources and
time, leaving less or no time for implementing the plan prepared. During the incubation period created due to
delay in lab to land transfer process of the plans prepared, the plans hardly meet the expectations as
ground reality change at a rapid pace. Multiplicity of institutions and duplication of data at various levels
have marred the desired results. Situation in India is in contrast to other countries, where, the professional
associations do have a major say in policies of the government on the subject. Our political system has
cautiously avoided the public participation in policy making. Most of the time is spent in making one
department or the other as the scapegoat when the plans fail to give the desired results. Let us not get
mired in history and "throw out the baby with the bathwater". Inspite of all these, laudable efforts have been
made in India by constituting a task force on National Geo-spatial Data Infrastructure (NGDI). Constructive
and creative suggestions are the need of the hour.

But let us remember that "the application of GIS is limited only by the imagination of those who use it "
(Jack Dangermond), and therefore " Sky is the limit " for applying GIS.

Conclusion
The solutions to the crises cities face lie in the cities themselves. GIS may not be the paragon of all virtues
but it could be important as one of several measures for addressing the problems confronting the urban
planners of today. One need not overemphasize on the fact that our cities and their problems are inherently
different from that in the developed countries and one cannot shake into a bottle, the American and the
British ideas, produce a mechanical mixture for a problem. Our vision towards making our cities intelligent

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using technologies like GIS should rather be problem oriented, reflecting the needs of the local people.

Of all creatures, humans are the only ones who can ponder over and understand a situation and the only
ones who can think up ways of doing something about a problem in a rational and logical way.

"GIS temper, Let's not lose it!"

References

Christina.E.Stalberg (1994), "The Intelligent City and Emergency Management in the 21st Century",
Proceedings of The International Emergency Management and Engineering Conference, 1994.
Edward.J.Blakely (2001), "Fortifying America: Planning for Fear", October 2001, www.planetizen.com
ESRI, "Geography Touches All our Lives, Everyday", ESRI News - Summer 1998, ARC News,
www.esri.com
Hiraskar, G.K (1989), "Fundamentals of Town Planning", DhanpatRai Publications (P) Ltd., New
Delhi
John.H.Hooker (2001), "The Death of an Icon", The Albuquerque Tribune, September 2001, U.S.A
Lim Hng Kiang (1999), "Defining Model Cities: Singapore's Perspective", Proceedings of the World
Conference on Model Cities, April 1999, Singapore
Michael Batty (2001), "Intelligent Cities: The Computer, The City, and The Planner", Sir Edward
Youde Memorial Fund Visiting Professor Scheme Lecture, Hong Kong
Sokhi, B.S (2000), "When Development is a Dilemma", GIS At Development, November 2000,
www.gisdevelopment.net
The World Bank (2000), "Cities in Transition: World Bank Urban and Local Government Strategy",
The World Bank, ISBN 0-8213-4591-5-SKU: 14591
The Hindu, Survey of the Environment 2001, "Gujarat Earthquake: Lessons to be learnt", The Hindu,
pp. 5-6, Chennai
The Hindu, Cities 2001, "Making Indian Cities", The Hindu, pp. 10-12, Chennai
UNCHS (1999), "Cities for All", Acting Executive Director's message on the occasion of World
Habitat Day 1999, Habitat Debate, Vol.5, No. 2, Nairobi

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