Environments by Design
Abstract
The simultaneous concerns of competitiveness, inclusion and sustainability are the critical issues for cities today. These are complex, non-figurative and fuzzy concepts. In a last few decade of a global effort, we have achieved a lot, but are still struggling to convert these notions from aspirations to meaningful actions. To address the gap in effective methodological tools to support the city planners and administrators in developing smart, inclusive, and sustainable cities, this paper presents an inclusive cities decision matrix for smart cities. The tool is developed based on a review of multidisciplinary literature from the urban sector, inputs from experts and city stakeholders and insights from comparative assessment of case studies using mixed methods and grounded theory. By applying the decision matrix on the case study cities in India, the paper argues that the contemporary planning tools for cities need to be multidisciplinary and flexible to respond to the unique needs of the diverse contexts. The paper contributes to the theory and practice of culturally responsive (inclusive) smart cities and the findings are useful to the decision makers of the city as well as the academic community.
Madhurima is a sustainable urban development specialist and academician with training in architecture, urban design and development planning and 18+ years of experience in the urban sector. She also has one year of advanced research experience in development planning from the U.K. and is completing her PhD research in the area of inclusive and forward-looking smart cities from the TERI Institute of Advanced Studies, New Delhi. She has been involved in design and planning projects covering around 20 cities in India and over 12 regional planning projects in 6 States of India. She has been involved in projects funded by the private sector, central; state; and local governments, and multilateral donor agencies like The World Bank, Cities Alliance, and DFID and contributed with technical, leadership, managerial, knowledge sharing and capacity building roles. Madhurima has built, led, managed, and advised multidisciplinary teams on large scale and complex projects and programs in the research as well as consultancy ecosystem. She has been contributing as a faculty and jury member at leading architecture and planning schools in India. Madhurima is author to a substantial body of high-quality consultancy reports, premier research-based works of national and global importance and conference publications.
12:45 pm - 2:15 pm
Wednesday 16th June, 2021