Urban Planning and the Smart City

URBANIZATION IS THE PRIMARY reason today’s cities have to become smarter in how they deliver their services. “Ten thousand people are moving to cities every hour of every single day, in places like Asia, Africa, and Latin America,” said Seeta Hariharan, general manager and group head, Digital Software & Solutions Group, Tata Consultancy Services, during a recent speech on ‘Smart Cities and Smart Behavior’ at the University of Maryland. Even in highly developed countries like the U.S., she said, urbanization has grown by 19%, just in the last 17 years. Urbanization is occurring globally for good reason, compelling enough for people to leave behind their hometowns and families. “Many are moving because they don’t have access to basic needs [in their hometowns] — needs such as health care, education, sanitation, or decent jobs,” Hariharan said. “If this trend of rapid urbanization continues, to sustain it, we would have to build a city as large as London from the ground up every month for the next 33 years.” As such, a city’s urban policymaking should focus on solving specific problems that come with dense populations, such as congestion, pollution and traffic safety, rather than imposing blanket rules. “The blind application of one instrument — like a tax for vehicle- kilometers travelled or land use deregulation — to solve one problem (like congestion or housing affordability) may worsen other problems,” according to Wharton professor Gilles Duranton and Erick Guerra, professor of city and regional planning in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, in their 2016 paper, “Urban Accessibility: Balancing Land Use and Transportation.” That’s not to say they shouldn’t have a cohesive strategy. Getting the big picture right before introducing smart transportation solutions is critical, Duranton said. “You can do smart street lighting, smart parking and what not, but I’m not sure all those add up to a policy on transportation. A policy on transportation, just like a policy on anything, must have a strategic element to it.” That calls for the combined expertise of both the engineer and the economist, he said. “You need a strategic decision on what sort of a city you want to be, what kind of transportation you want, and what sort of local economic development policies you want, if any.” Duranton and Guerra urged cities to prioritize the accessibility of movement, or the ease by which residents can reach their destinations. “Accessibility is the main urban quantity to consider from a resource allocation standpoint since it links land use and transportation, the two primary urban consumption goods.” They said policymakers often ignore, misuse, and misunderstand accessibility. The result is the inequitable and inefficient misallocation of the two most important urban consumption goods — housing and transportation access. However, a number of conflicts could still arise. For example, there could be tradeoffs between land use, transportation and other public amenities like open space or the quality and character of a place. “We understand that one city’s residents may favor economic development when another favors historical character and amenities,” Duranton and Guerra said. The best approach to solve those problems is to approach them one by one, “improving policy at the margin, rather than determining an ideal and setting policies to resolve it.” BELFORT VS. PARIS The city of Belfort in France adopted smart strategies to connect its bus transportation network, Hariharan said. Belfort achieved a “remarkable” feat recently when it turned its entire bus network into a ‘smart’ system in just four weeks and without deploying a single new sensor. Belfort achieved that rapid transformation by bringing together existing data to generate new information. The city got ‘smart’ via data analytics based on information already accessible to planners. It brought together data sources such as bus billing, ticketing data and GPS systems, which in turn allow city officials to make informed decisions to improve services on the city’s five bus routes. For example, the software works out the speed of buses between each stop to identify congestion points and allows the city to make any appropriate changes. Paris is at the other end of that ‘smart’ spectrum with its transportation policies, according to Duranton. In 2001, Paris introduced regulatory changes that reduced the road space available for vehicles in order to slow down vehicles. However, it was not offset by increased patronage of bus travel by residents or by increased bus speeds. “The policy generated a considerable time loss for car users and for goods delivery vehicles, and even environmental losses, without gains for public transport users,” according to University of Paris professors Rémy Prud’homme and Pierre Kopp in the book “Road Congestion Pricing in Europe.” “Paris is unsmart with its transportation policy in that it is tearing down all its arterial roads,” said Duranton. “There is this notion that cars are a problem — they create accidents, pollution and congestion. But the solution is not getting rid of cars and [think] everybody will be perfectly happy driving their bikes or whatever. That is not the answer for a large city like Paris.” URBAN PLANNING IN INDIA Shortcomings in urban planning and governance structures could have long-term repercussions, not just resulting in haphazard development but also in welfare costs for the less privileged. However, those effects could be mitigated to some extent with investments in public transportation, updated laws and regulations and corrective planning actions, according to Wharton professor of real estate Mariaflavia Harari. She recently spent time doing research in India, which resulted in her December 2016 paper “Cities in Bad Shape: Urban Geometry in India.” Harari’s findings point to a wide range of policy options to improve urban mobility and prevent the deterioration in connectivity that fast city growth entails. For one, urban mobility can be enhanced through direct interventions in the transportation sector, such as investments in infrastructure and public transit. Second, urban connectivity can be indirectly improved through more compact development, which in turn could be encouraged through master plans and land use regulations. One important measure in urban planning is the floor area ratio (FAR) — or floor space index (FSI), the term for it in India. That determines the extent of vertical development permitted on a given piece of land. In many U.S. cities, development tends to be denser in the center of the city and then it tapers down progressively towards the cities’ peripheries. However, in India, Harari noticed more high-rise buildings on the outskirts of cities like New Delhi. The chief reason is that enforcement of regulations is lax in areas outside city limits, although they are very much a part of that particular urban agglomeration. “In India you have a contrast: very tight regulation in the cities and relatively less stringent regulations or less clear planning in the periphery of the cities,” she said. Haphazard development leads to distortions in costs. In her paper, Harari attempts to quantify the costs borne by people living in a city with “non-compact layouts.” She wrote that connectivity refers to a city that has a geometric layout that is conducive to shorter trips. Her study of rents in cities with varying degrees of connectivity revealed that households pay a premium to live in cities with better connectivity. “People are willing to pay 4% of their income in order to live in a city that has better connectivity,” she said. A city with compact layouts expands in circles as opposed to expanding in all directions. For example, in the Indian city of Kolkata, development is elongated along the north-south axis and narrower along that axis, as opposed to Bangalore where development is roughly like a pentagon, and more circular. “The average distance between any two points in Bangalore is shorter than it is in Kolkata,” Harari noted, adding that her methodology accounts for the geographical attributes of a city that might allow it to grow more along the north-south axis or in concentric circles. To be sure, regulation also plays an important role. “Cities with more restrictive FARs, all else being equal, end up taking less compact shapes,” said Harari. Outdated laws also skew development in wrong directions. Harari found “no correlation” between earthquake-proneness and FARs in Indian cities, although it would be obvious to planners to avoid tall buildings in areas that are vulnerable to earthquakes. Instead, she saw a connection elsewhere: Cities with more restrictive FARs were those that were directly under British rule, which ended in 1947. Her conclusion: “That is partly explained by the British urban planning paradigm of low density, and then that stayed on because those laws have not been changed.”