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Smart cities promote best practice in sustainability
A smart city is much more than a city that is digitally enabled and brimming with technology. It is a city that leverages innovation to achieve its desired outcomes – and here innovation does not necessarily mean only technology.
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This is the view of Carshif Talip, expertise leader, urban planning and land infrastructure at Zutari. “A smart city is a city where opportunity, amenity, safety, resilience, inclusivity and prosperity are imperatives, and innovation across financing, design, construction, operations and governance is embraced by all stakeholders to achieve these imperatives.”
President Ramaphosa announced in his 2021 State of the Nation Address that the masterplan for the proposed Lanseria Smart City had been completed in November last year. The project is a joint initiative of the Presidency, the Office of the Gauteng Premier, Tshwane, Johannesburg and Mogale. It is based on best practice in urban sustainability and the principles underpinning the smart city concept.
The fact that innovation is such an integral part of smart cities makes for a natural fit between smart cities and sustainability. The emphasis on digital platforms also enables data collection, and the availability of large data sets is one of the first steps towards optimisation.
Proper planning is the answer to rapid urbanisation, inadequate infrastructure and polarised development. Equally important is an integrated approach, as with the Lanseria Smart City. “A siloed approach, whether that be across the various spheres of government, the private and public sectors or even within a municipal entity itself, needs to be eliminated if we are to be successful,” urges Talip.
Each stakeholder needs to have their role and contribution clearly defined and have the necessary resources to deliver. Finally, a measure of agility and fluidity needs to be built in. “Planning, in essence, is designing a path based on a predicted future. If that future changes, and one just has to look at how unpredictable 2020 was due to the Covid19 pandemic, the plan needs to be sufficiently adaptable to respond to change,” stresses Talip.
In terms of the impact of Covid-19 on future urban planning requirements, one positive outcome has been that flexible working arrangements are now possible. “The need for large swathes of office space will certainly be challenged, and tenants will demand more flexible arrangements from their landlords,” notes Talip. While there will always be a brick-and-mortar component to retail, there is certainly a move towards online retail. These two phenomena could challenge planning concepts
like centralising commercial areas, and even the concept of what a CBD looks like. This might have a profound impact on what cities look like in the future.
Another impact of Covid-19 has been the disruption of global supply chains. What will be interesting to see in the long term is if governments around the world – who anticipate more severe pandemics in future – shift towards self-reliance rather than global imports. Therefore, governments might consider reigniting primary and secondary economic sectors such as mining, agriculture and manufacturing. “Should this happen, we could expect shifts in urban migration that could impact planning requirements,” predicts Talip.
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THE GREATER LANSERIA MASTERPLAN | Tomorrow’s sustainable city today
The brief for the Greater Lanseria Masterplan is to be a truly post-apartheid city based on best practice in terms of urban sustainability and the principles underpinning the smart city. It is to be inclusive of the broadly defined South African socio-economic spectrum and must stimulate a vibrant, mixed-urban economy. Activity zones should be compact in their spatial extent; they must also be complex in their mix of urban uses. Living at higher residential densities within patterns of more intense urbanity make it possible to achieve far higher levels of efficiency in terms of infrastructural services and public transport systems. It increases the evenness and efficacy with which social services and amenities are provided.
The design of the inclusionary city starts with the importance of the public environment and the way a “responsive architecture” defines the natural surveillance of that environment: the tenets of safe city design apply and a people-first, rather than a car-first mentality leads the design process. Highly permeable, safe pedestrian and cycle systems need to be augmented with a comprehensive, street system defined less by class of traffic function and more by networked connectivity that is future-proofed as urban mobility rapidly reinvents itself.
An important aspect of the city economy is its infrastructural investment, not simply in how it is funded but also the inclusion of myriad upstream and downstream aspects of its economic chain. Much of the contemporary thinking regarding urban sustainability recognises this as well as the more obvious aspects of energy-efficiency and the striving for carbon-neutral systems.
The inclusionary economy
It is necessary to see the design of the public environment as one of the most important generators for spawning economic cross-over. This means embracing inclusion rather than simplistic models of separation and specialisation as has been the case. How the energies of one investment into the urban system are harnessed through careful urban design to spawn other opportunities is a vital aspect of the layout and enablement of activity zones, be this at the city-scale of, for example, an airport or a logistics hub, or the more localised scale of an open-air market.
While incremental delivery of service delivery must be paced according to residential demand, early-warning systems must be put in place to ensure “just-in-time” delivery of comprehensively managed facilities.
An open-ended approach
An interdisciplinary planning approach proposes a group of new utilities to undertake: • Waste-to-energy using pyrolysis • Regional waste-sorting and recycling • Biogas production • Smart-grid power • Instituting district cooling as a utility • Harvesting fertiliser value from waste treatment • Water treatment and polishing • Waterless/less-water-based sewer systems • Harvesting water at scale • Replenishment of the ground-water system • Augmenting energy production with water-pumping systems • Instituting a variety of green industries • Green building • Renewable energy
