Smart City Foundation—Driver of Smart Cities

Abstract

A smart city is viewed as a sustainable, inclusive and prosperous city that promotes a people-centric approach based on three core components and seven dimensions. The three core components are Smart City Foundation, ICT and Smart Institutions and Laws, which in turn are the pillars of the seven dimensions of a smart city: Infrastructure Development, Environmental Sustainability, Social Development, Social Inclusion, Disasters Exposure, Resilience, and Peace and Security. The three components together with the seven dimensions make a Smart Economy. A smart city foundation is composed of three elements: Urban Planning and Design, Land Policies and Basic Infrastructure. For a city foundation to be smart, it must be inclusive at the onset of the urban planning and promotes mixed neighborhoods where social clustering is discouraged. The chapter’s first section analyzes the planning of the city of Dakar, an agglomeration of 3.2 million people in 2015. During these past two centuries of growth of the agglomeration of Dakar, urban planning has served as a tool of social exclusion with poor living in unplanned wetland settlements characterized by lack of sufficient land allocated to streets and public spaces, and lack of security of tenure, the latter being the focus of the second section. These settlements are also characterized by insufficient coverage of basic infrastructure such as connection to piped water facilities, sewerage and drainage systems, energy source and solid management; this is analyzed in the third section. Building in unplanned wetlands without adequate drainage systems exposes the population of Dakar, particularly of the suburbs, to flooding that causes various material and financial damages and losses. The fourth section focuses on the flooding: occurrences, causes, consequences and responses. Today, national and local authorities are working together to make the city of Dakar a smart city through Urban and Territorial Development Programmes. Taking back the city of Dakar where it belongs, a green, smart city, will require transformative policies and actions including establishing new planned settlements and a re-planning of the city itself where agriculture activities and green spaces have their effective places. The Plan Directeur 2035 of Dakar as adopted in 2014 explores the foundations for sustainable urban development, with establishment of six new urban centers around the capital. The fifth section of this chapter focuses on analysis of several policies and programs initiated by national and local authorities under the ambitious program, the Senegal Emerging Plan “Plan Senegal Emergent,” aim to make a Dakar a smart city with a smart economy.