Understanding the Impact of Smart Cities and the Need for Smart Regulations

Abstract

As the world continues to urbanize, with close to 180,000 people moving into cities every day, the competition between urban cities will continue to grow economically, socially, and environmentally. The cities that will embrace technology will surface as the winners. There is, therefore, a pressing need for these cities to get smarter, as to handle this large-scale urbanization and finding new ways to manage complexity, increase efficiency, reduce expenses, and improve quality of life. According to Smart Cities Council, “A smart city is one that has digital technology embedded across all city functions”. Governments across the world are keen on setting up smart cities, where technology can help people access, in real time, infrastructure services like traffic, parking, lighting, and water. The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, has spoken about building 100 smart cities in India by 2022. Underline is that Smart cities are the need of the hour to enable an efficient and sustainable solution for servicing urban growth. These futuristic cities need to address issues of data management, including intellectual property rights, proper data handling, and physical storage and distribution requirements, as well as issues relating to safety of its citizens. Development of smart regulations, stimulating deployment of connected devices at the public and private levels, as well as integration of BIG DATA is of critical importance for cities to become “smarter”. Integration of this public and private data can provide valuable insights for the regulators, the policy makers and the citizens, but at the same time cause redundancy, security and privacy concerns. The policy makers need to explore new strategies that will allow them to anticipate and adapt more quickly to changes that the technological advancement brings. In this paper, I explore some of the most recognized and accepted definitions of “smart cities”, and how this concept proposes to change various domains of our everyday life, such as infrastructure, healthcare, governance, energy, and mobility, and also shed a light upon some of the challenges faced by the current legal and regulatory framework in promoting technological advancement and the need for “smart regulations” to enable “Internet of Things” (IoT) and smart cities.