Commentary
These days we often hear politicians and policy makers talking about building smart city everywhere. On many occasions, they are making these remarks without understanding what it really means and takes it to build a smart city.
However, the concept of smart city is being advanced as a campaign across the globe.
Smart city is a city that incorporates information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance the quality and performance of urban services such as energy, transportation and utilities in order to reduce resource consumption, wastage and overall costs.
Actually, the building of long-term city is also included in the concept of smart city. Environment and eco-system are given special priority in the smart city. But these things are not given priority in many cases.
That is why; broader discussions are going on across the world regarding the smart city or sustainable city. This kind of deliberations should also be held in Nepal too.
In urban areas, people often overlook the environmental side while building various kinds of infrastructures in Nepal.
People focus more on concrete use while building houses or any other infrastructure in Nepal. They tend to ignore the conservation of water sources, promotion of greenery and protection of biodiversity and environment.
The concept of long-term city gives special priority to the conservation of environment and uplifting the living standard of the people.
The concept of sustainable city focuses on building disaster-resistant infrastructure and also on long-term technology and transportation management, conservation of culture and monuments and construction of gardens in open places.
Now, we are in the phase of constructing infrastructure. The process of ubranisation is moving ahead in full swing. There is a growing trend of people migrating from village to city in search of various services and facilities. Not only in Nepal, this has been a trend worldwide.
Various studies have shown that the trend of migration from rural to urban areas has been increasing due to climate change.
As the people are migrating to urban area at an unprecedented rate, protecting eco-system in the city area has become a serious challenge.
If we do not resolve this issue on time, it will pose a serious threat to our environment. Thus, the time has come to think about how we can make the city sustainable while building the smart city.
We are already late to given proper attention on the issues like use of energy, transportation system and afforestation among others. Apart from that, we need to give attention on the conservation of water sources.
Many study shows that it would be better to manage water from the local water sources in the long run rather than from the big projects.
We have to use human, natural and economic sources to fulfill today’s necessity and should also adopt a way to ensure the availability of those resources for the future generation while constructing the long-term city.
The main sentiment of the long-term city is that the people should use means and resources for their benefit and also think about the benefit of other communities.
Similarly, health eco-system is the pre-condition of constructing this kind of city.
We had done many mistakes while designing and constructing cities in the past. We should be very careful to not repeat those kinds of mistakes in the coming days.
