(GIST OF YOJANA) Use of Technology in Urban Planning

(May-2023)

Use of Technology in Urban Planning

Introduction:

Urban planning is the process of both developing and designing open land, urban areas, and the built environment.
Urban Planning dates back its history since the town and cities have existed. Early city planning revolved around some essential and significant elements like building structures and bastions with fortification, and has experienced a huge change throughout the centuries.
Urban planning is a many-sided process involving infrastructure like physical and social, utility systems, communication networks, distribution chains, and more. Urban planners, also known as city planners, design cities and create plans for future improvements and growth.
In the modern era, the rapid boom of Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence has more significant potential to incorporate diverse issues of city planning into a general platform, as well as leading to a better way to deal with the challenges of complexity.
The use of Information Technology has helped urban planners in many aspects, especially with softwares based on GIS (Geographic Information System).

Contemporary technologies to aid urban planning:

There are various urban planning apps that can be used by urban planners, and that use contemporary technologies as well as open data to build up comprehensive and lively spaces for inhabitants and commercial businesses.
There are various planning tools which help in the urban design process and assist to generate areas that the population of a city needs.
GIS in urban planning is becoming gradually more helpful over time. With open source data, many open source Various GIS softwares have come up as a free and open-source cross-platform.
With the help of GIS improved mapping along with locational attributes, this has been possible, which was missing in the earlier drawing and mapping software.
GIS is being used in all the Government offices for record keeping, such as property mapping, utility services like water supply and sewerage networks for seeing the coverage of water supply and sanitation system; it is also used in Municipal Solid Waste Management to identify the zones in order to manage the MSW Management system.
GIS is also used in network analysis by transport planners in order to analyse the road network, to identify the conflict points at various junctions, to identify the various road hierarchies, etc.
Urban planners can establish a database to get information about specific metropolitan regions using cloud technologies.
Cloud computing technologies can also aid in the planning of bigger infrastructure projects.
Urban planners may use the internet to create cities that are accommodating to distant workers. As a result, urban designs have better transportation alternatives and reduced traffic congestion.

Internet of Things and Urban Planning:

Several fundamental IoT tools such as intelligent street lights that automatically turn off to conserve energy are already in use in India.
Urban planners can create ideas that improve the infrastructure of cities by employing technology to establish self-management strategies to create smarter cities and put more emphasis on growing communities and neighbourhoods.
Cities achieve more financial stability, independence, and provision of green space this way. These instances demonstrate how technology may be utilised to develop smarter city plans and foster more community participation.
Technology will also enable urban planners to concentrate more on creating communities, leading to a higher level of municipal self-sufficiency.
Citizens may participate more actively in the creation of sustainable and environmentally friendly cities in this way.