The Fragile and the Smart City

“Managing urban areas has become one of the most important challenges of the 21st century” – John Wilmoth, Director of UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ Population Division(1) .

In 1950, 30% of the world’s population was living in urban areas; today, this percentage has reached 54%. Continuous urbanisation, combined with the overall growth of the world’s population, could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050, mainly concentrated in Asian and African countries(2). This sustained trend has led to the development of mega-cities(3) , which number has jumped from 10 in 1990 to 28(4) .

As cities continue to grow at an alarming rate, the level of inequality also continues to rise and municipal services are increasingly unable to meet the needs of their fast growing populations, including access to basic services such as housing, electricity, water, sanitation & transportation. As a result, a new social category – “the fragile city”(5) – has emerged. The fragile city is “a discrete metropolitan unit whose governance arrangements exhibit a declining ability and/or willingness to deliver on the social contract”(6). Informal settlements or slums are symptoms of fragile cities: from 760 million in 2000, the number of slum dwellers has grown to 863 million in 2014(7) . In Africa, over half of the urban population (61.7%) lives in slums(8) . Slums growth appears inevitable in the context of rapid urban migration as individuals with low resources come to cities (or stay in cities) looking for upward mobility, slums being a temporary stop. By 2030, about 3 billion people will need proper housing and access to adequate infrastructure services(9) .

“Cities in the past were built on riverbanks. They are now built along highways. But in the future, they will be built based on availability of optical fiber networks and next generation infrastructure. [..] If we have to generate employment and change for the better, we plan to build 100 smart cities.” Narendra Modi, Indian Prime Minister.

Smart cities can become a pathway to the inclusion of a neglected part of the urban population. According to India Urban Development Minister Mr Venkaiah Naidu(10) , smart cities should be people-centric. He emphasized the importance of “uninterrupted” energy and water service, along with “proper sanitation” and “efficient management of solid waste”. This approach resonates with the words of Robert Muggah: “in a generally deprived areas, the concept of smart cities could have a more humanistic approach where smart cities aim to improve the quality of life of its residents, such as strengthen urban resilience, investing in high-quality public transport to maximize mobility, promoting the efficient use of energy, strengthening service delivery.”

Mobile enabling smart utility services for slum dwellers

By their informal nature, slums are rich of culture, foster entrepreneurial activities and are nodes of creativity, where mobile phones (from low to high end models) can be personal communication tools but also become ladders to economic empowerment.

As noted in the GSMA Mobile Economy 2014 report(11) , “minimal levels of urbanisation correspond directly to low subscriber penetration figures”. In 2013, there were more than 5.4 Billion connections in the developing world, a mobile penetration of 89%. The ubiquity of mobile coverage in cities, high density of urban settlements, low cost handsets available from grey markets and the proliferation of airtime street vendors have been driving mobile growth in emerging markets. The combination of socio-economic and infrastructure challenges mean that 2G connections will also still account of the majority of connections in developing markets until 2018(12) .

Globally, adoption of mobile money is still limited but keeps increasing, especially in East Africa where the total number of registered mobile money accounts has reached 89.3 million at the end of Q3 2014(13). For the unbanked population, credit services are now being offered to mobile customers, with innovative partnerships leveraging mobile payment infrastructures to determine credit worthiness(14).

Either part of slum upgrading programmes(15) , municipal, entrepreneurial approaches and decentralised solutions can help utility service providers meet fast growing needs. In the way mobile plays a crucial role in bringing internet access to populations without access to fixed infrastructure, mobile can also support bridging access to both centralised and decentralised basic infrastructure in underserved settlements, where 2G phones and low cost machine to machine connectivity increases the flow of information between institutions, service providers, infrastructure and end users.

How can mobile be leveraged for transformational change of utility services in underserved urban environments? What are the promising mobile-enabled models and what has been the impact achieved so far? In a second post, we will look in more details at the concept of smart solutions in the slum context, where networked infrastructure and connected consumers can be built leveraging the widespread mobile phone ownership, increasing access to mobile financial services and innovative market-based solutions based on low cost connectivity.