Dhaka 4.0: the promise of a smarter city
As rapid urbanisation gains pace along with technological advancements, cities are increasingly competing with each other to attract businesses, investors and people. As part of their competition strategy, they have begun to market themselves as smart cities.
But what is a smart city? A smart city is an urban area that uses different types of electronic data to manage assets and resources efficiently. A smart city should be efficient in usage of energy, and it should rely more on renewable energy. It should be efficient in managing waste—in fact, such a city should be able to reuse and recycle most of its solid and liquid waste. A smart city should emit minimum carbon into the atmosphere, and it should minimise its carbon footprint too.
Today, Dhaka is a city of more than 18 million people. The Greater Dhaka city area is more than 300 square kilometres. The population of the city is growing continuously, either by birth or by migration. Historically, the city is about 800 years old and it has many heritage structures. But the city's ability to provide urban facilities to such a large number of people is not growing at the same pace. Hence, the city must adopt a technology-led transformation of services to its citizens.
A smart city would have smart homes for its residents. Such homes leverage technology for optimum resource utilisation and living standard improvement. A smart city encourages more green buildings and upgrades the existing buildings for efficient use of energy. Smart homes deploy energy-efficient lighting and optimised illumination to keep buildings well lit and safe, as well as energy efficient. The encouraging trend is that a lot of new buildings in Dhaka are being built using the green building specifications.
A smart city should be designed for an inclusive transportation framework. It should allow residents to walk safely and comfortably, or ride bicycles while commuting within the city. Many cities in developed countries have been creating separate lanes for riding bicycles, thus encouraging their residents to use this healthier and greener way of commuting. Some cities have started experimenting with bicycle-sharing platforms. Using such platforms, a resident can obtain a bicycle from a specified place and ride to his/her destination. Upon reaching the destination, the rider can return the bicycle to a nearby specified place. A similar model can also be tried in Dhaka to make the city greener, and its residents healthier.
A smart city should have an environment-friendly mass rapid transportation system for assisting its residents to move across different parts of the city. At the same time, motor traffic should be intelligently managed on the streets, providing most efficient utilisation of those streets. The parking areas should be intelligently managed so that minimum parking space can offer maximum parking opportunities to motorists. Electric vehicle technology has made significant progress over the last couple of years, and is becoming commercially affordable. A smart city should have well-spread charging points to encourage motorists to use such vehicles.
Further, a city authority must set a goal to create a framework for the information and communications infrastructure needed for making the city smarter, and for fostering an environment in which private enterprises can participate to build it. Such infrastructure can be built through collaborative partnerships too. Subsequently, the private enterprises can build value-added services on this infrastructure for the residents of the city. Public-private partnerships will be instrumental in developing everything that a smart city needs to ensure higher transparency into its operations.
Urban crimes are increasingly moving indoors and online, and away from the streets. Domestic violence, child and elder abuse are taking place behind closed doors, while traditional police patrolling happens on the streets. Digitalisation has led to the proliferation of cybercrimes that do not occur in the physical world and are borderless. Today, citizens of Bangladesh spend a significant amount of time on the internet and social media platforms. In a smart city, communities move online, and thus they require policing there too. This creates new types of challenges for the law enforcement agencies. A smart city policing system should be able to address such requirements effectively.
Hyper-competitive cities are going to be the new order of the world with more than half of the population becoming urban by 2050. The trends are visible today. For example, Amazon, the largest online retailer in the world, has published a request of proposal from cities in North America for setting up its second headquarter, dubbed as HQ2. According to the estimate published by Amazon, HQ2 will create direct employment for about 50,000 workers, usually individuals with earnings higher than any city's average per capita income. Such an open request for proposal has drawn the attention of about 238 cities across Canada, Mexico and the United States, which responded to this request. Amazon has shortlisted 20 of these cities for further evaluation, and will soon choose a city for HQ2. Dhaka 4.0 needs to prepare itself for such competition. Leading businesses that are headquartered in Dhaka today are also aspiring to become multinational companies. If the city cannot offer them the right kind of facilities and services, they will likely choose another city as their new headquarters and drive their expansion from there. Hence, readiness for competition at the regional level is going to be an important success factor in the coming years.
The writer is a partner at the PwC. The views expressed here are personal.