A Hybrid Indexing Approach for Sustainable Smart Cities Development

Abstract

It has become crucial to categorize the complete urban planning scenario for architecturally, socially, and economically viable cities due to irresistible population progression. Urban migratory population from rural to urban has encountered towards sustainable urban planning. Being an issue of argument since earlier decades, the sustainability has always been endeavoured towards development of suitable sustainable indicators for Indian scenarios. The introduction of a smart city concept has provided an open space for development of integrated sustainable hybrid index consisting of the social, economic, and environmental aspects of the system. The current note tries to conceptualize the development, evaluation, and implementation of a new hybrid index for sustainable development considering multi-dimensional indicators. This index can be broadly envisioned to implement three key parameters like social, economic, and environmental components, with an ancillary parameter like citizen perception as a fourth parameter to provide a significant role towards sustainable smart cities. These will assist development of sustainable smart cities and contribution of urban constraints towards rising environmental issues to provide a proposition for implementation of hybrid index as a worthy tool for better sustainable smart cities development.