Don’t be fooled: ‘Gated communities are not smart cities’

KARACHI:

The new buzzword for urban planners is “smart city”. And in Pakistan too, real estate moguls have started using this term for master planned residential projects. The only question is whether their ‘cities’ are really smart?

“My idea of a smart city is an inclusive one, a compact city,” explained urban sustainability expert Farhan Anwar. A smart city would have people from various socio-economic backgrounds. It would not be a gated community. “These ones are just isolated ecosystems.”

The discussion came up at the launch of Anwar’s NGO, Sustainable Initiatives, on Friday. It was tied into a brainstorming session on solutions for Karachi’s garbage collection crisis. The Express Tribune asked Anwar how these new master planned ‘smart cities’ were going to manage the waste they produced given that Karachi was already suffering from bad solid waste management. These new residential enclaves in Pakistan are being marketed as having reduced waste initiatives and recycling. “But all these communities eventually become a municipal liability,” argued panelist Prof Noman Ahmed, who heads the department of architecture and planning at NED University. Even independent land management agencies (for eg, DHA) say they manage their own garbage but the truth is that ultimately the Karachi city government has to do the dirty work. “What we see is that at night DHA and cantonment garbage trucks turn their headlights off and dump their garbage in the city landfills,” said Prof Noman. The problem is that these authorities never come to an agreement on taxation. Who should pay the taxes to whom and where should that money get spent providing services like garbage collection.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 22^nd, 2014.