Performance Evaluation of Sustainable Smart Cities in India: An Adaptation of Cartography in PROMETHEE-GIS Approach

Introduction

As India’s population continues to raise, more citizens are moving to cities. Professionals expect that about 25-30 people are migrating every minute to major Indian cities from rural areas in search of better living and better lifestyles. It is estimated that by the end of the year 2050, the number of people living in Indian cities will touch 843 million. To accommodate this massive urbanization, India must try to find smarter ways to manage problems, reduce expenses, increase efficiency and improve the quality of life. A smart city is a town that practices diverse electronic data collection sensors to supply information which is use to manage assets and resources efficiently. This includes data collected from citizens, devices, and assets that is processed and analyzed to monitor and manage traffic and transportation systems, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement, information systems, schools, libraries, hospitals, and other community services. The smart city concept integrates information and communication technology (ICT) (Yigitcanlar and Baum 2008; Caragliu et al. 2011), and various physical devices connected to the network (the internet of things or IOT) to enhance the efficiency of city operations and services and connect to citizens. Smart city technology allows city administrators to interact directly with both community and city infrastructure and to monitor what is happening in the city and how the city is sprouting. ICT is used to improve quality and performance of urban services, to reduce costs and resource consumption and to improve the contact between citizens and government. Smart city applications are established to manage urban streams and allow for real-time responses. A smart city may therefore be more equipped to respond to challenges than one with a simple transactional relationship with its citizens. Yet, the term itself remains unclear to its essentials and therefore, open to many interpretations. Other terms that have been used for similar concepts include cyber villages, digital city, electronic communities, flex city, information city, intelligent city, knowledge-based city, mesh city, Telecity, Teletopia, ubiquitous city, wired city. The notion of smart city is relatively new and can be seen as a successor of information city, digital city and sustainable city (Yigitcanlar 2006).

Major technological, economic and environmental changes have encouraged interest in smart cities, including climate change, economic reformation, the move to online retail and entertainment, mature populations, urban population growth and pressures on public finances. European union (EU) has devoted constant efforts to developing a strategy for achieving 'smart' urban growth for its metropolitan city-regions. In 2010, it emphasized its attention on solidification of origination and investment in ICT services for the purpose of refining public services and quality of life. Examples of smart city technologies and programs have been implemented in Singapore, Dubai, Milton Keynes, Southampton, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, Stockholm, china and New York. Smart city has evolved since its initial arrival in 1996 to the developing market and to a multi-discipline scientific domain. Recently, most standardization bodies around the globe have introduced several competitive standards in their attempt to clarify the smart city and corresponding industrial products. Though, standardization has left out so far smart services modelling as well as corresponding policy making. Such policy making is mainly supported by decision making tools like multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) but it has not been modeled yet. Sustainability and sustainable urban development concepts generate awareness of the production and use of resources required for residential, industrial, transportation, commercial or recreational processes (Yigitcanlar et al. 2007; Pietrosemoli and Monroy 2013; Goonetilleke et al. 2014; Yigitcanlar and Kamruzzaman 2014, 2015)