INTERVIEW
Smart City as a Perennial Conversation “Everything is interrelated, and smart cities is an evolving conversation. I always tell people that you don't build a railroad or a highway twice, instead you improvize, making it better, faster, and more efficient through the use of technology”, says Sergio Fernandez de Cordova, Chairman, PVBLIC Foundation, and a Permanent UN observer, in an exclusive interview with Geospatial World. Post the pandemic disruption, there have been a lot of socioeconomic transformations, as well as individual and collective behavioral adaptations. Now the talk of the town everywhere is designing resilient cities. What role do you think geospatial technology can play in this? Resilience means understanding your environment and being ready to act, not just through data, but also figuring out how climate impacts our communities, cities and critical infrastructure. Look at how Singapore's Land Authority is using geospatial to not only look at resiliency, but also for education and transforming how people live, how they engage with the city, how they are actually buying new homes or moving, or how they are finding their next job. Singapore is an incredible example of how we all aspire for our communities and our cities to be. In order to build resilience and smart and intelligent communities, we need to have multi-stakeholder
engagements. We need public-private partnerships to ensure that we are not leaving anyone behind. There’s a need to build infrastructure to advance how people engage with each other, and how a city listens because a city is not just about what it's creating for its habitants, its residents, and its visitors, but also, how it listens, learns, and interacts.
City planning has undergone many underlying transitions over the years. Earlier, the focus was on just designing infrastructure, but now, there has been a conscious shift towards a human-centric city, an urban sphere that would prioritize human needs and aspirations above all. How do you think can this be synchronized with the sustainability imperative? The evolution of the conversation on smart cities is about smart digital infrastructure. As I said, cities need to absorb information and listen to improve the services for people, create security, and advance services.
What we have witnessed in the first world countries is that the disparity between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ has become greater, because the infrastructure's only been focused on the people that have the ability to afford it – the affluent communities and the taxpayers. Again, when we relook at this evolution of smart communities and smart cities, a vacuum has been created in the last ten years. There are communities that have nothing: no infrastructure and no intelligence inputs to secure a better life for themselves. We have retrofitted and built this infrastructure for the first world users. And I think that, from our perspective, this is one of the greatest opportunity areas to work upon and ensure we become totally inclusive and utilize sustainable development goals so that no child misses education, and with the right access to information we are able to build a better future for everyone. To me, everything is interrelated. Smart cities is an evolving converSeptember-October 2022 | www.geospatialworld.net | 31
