Note4students
Mains Paper 1: Social Issues | Urbanization – problems and remedies
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important:
Prelims level: India Urban Observatory, Smart cities mission
Mains level: Making the cities data-smart
News
- Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has launched the state-of-the-art India Urban Observatory and Video Wall.
What is Urban Observatory?
- It is a platform that uses data from different sources to enable analysis and visualization over a geospatial platform can make this possible.
- The concept of Urban Observatories was formally initiated at the UN Habitat-II Conference in 1997 in Istanbul.
- Some examples of well-established Urban Observatories are the Global Urban Observatory network, the Dublin Dashboard and the City Dashboard of London.
- Such platforms churn out interesting analyses and visualizations by collating massive datasets.
India Urban Observatory
- It is an important component of the recently launched DataSmart Cities strategy that envisions creating a ‘Culture of Data’ in cities, for intelligent use of data in addressing complex urban challenges.
- Making cities ‘DataSmart’ is key to realizing the full potential of technology interventions and innovation ecosystems in cities.
- The Data Smart Cities Policy allows cities to open their data to public view, such as number of hospitals, gardens, people, public toilets and other city management, the official added.
- It will be a separate portal for Smart Cities under the data.gov website.