Advertisment

Geographic Information System: The First Step to Developing a Smart City

author-image
DQINDIA Online
New Update

Our future cities are going to be different and their concept of smartness & sustainability varies with adopting one or other parameters. It is important to keep in mind that all cities are different; therefore there is not one smart & sustainable city concept, but rather a toolbox of solutions available to help cities serve their citizens better.

Advertisment

Intelligent planning, intelligent design, intelligent infrastructure, cleaner environment, extraordinary facilities & services to the investors, visitors & citizens will be the necessity & key to the future cities and further making such cities sustainable is another gigantic task, No easy job.

Many of the basic building blocks for creating smart cities are available. What we are talking about is more an ongoing evolution than a disruptive change. To make this happen effectively, Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) forms a backbone of such smart cities & will play increasingly important roles in the future management and governance of cities, as well as citizens who work and live in them.

Information in form of large, complex streams of data, that can be represented spatially, will play an important role. We may refer this as advent of the ‘big data’ era. Big data is the term assigned to the big data is, essentially, everything captured or recorded digitally by modern information and communications technologies, such as ‘geospatial technology’, ‘sensors’, ‘smart objects and devices’; etc. Big data are thus represented being proposed as an important new source of insights into the management and governance.

Advertisment

Powerful conceptualization, intelligent planning, smart designing, strong execution, and smart management would need a very strong technology tool and a geographic information science (GIS) is an only powerful technological tool for generating and comprehending big data via the spatial representation providing location enriched information, analysing it instantly and making reliable & intelligent decisions based on such data and to maps the physical world into virtual environment as a referencing framework.

A geographic information science is the science behind the technology. It is a multidisciplinary field, where many disciplines contribute to these such as remote sensing, aerial photography, geodesy & surveying, Photogrammetry cartography, spatial statistics. It is ‘spatial’ and ‘geographic’. Geographic’ has to do with the Earth and its two-dimensional surface, whereas ‘spatial’ has to do with any multi-dimensional frame ‘geographic’ is a subset of ‘spatial’, often the terms are used interchangeably.

Beyond Maps Location Enriched Information: Geographic Information Science for Smart City

Advertisment

The data layering on a map can give you a clearer picture of the nature, extent, and distribution of a condition, and make it easier to compare it with other issues in the same area. This further give clues to the origin or cause of a condition and suggest means of addressing the problem. It can show you exactly where to concentrate your efforts. A GIS map can show a large amount of information all at once. It may, for instance, illustrate for a targeted neighborhood infrastructure, physiography, hydrology, vegetation, buildings, population density, etc. The ability to see all these factors together can be a powerful tool for assessment and planning. By choosing layers to display, you can look at the interaction of various pairs of factors, or just look at the geographic spread of specific ones.GIS provides the evidence on which to base planning and implementation decisions, as well as a basis on which to justify those decisions to funders and policy makers. It can show you change over time. Comparing two maps, one showing the incidence of a condition two years ago and the other current, can help you understand where and how your efforts are succeeding and where and how they’re not. GIS maps can help policy makers understand issues more clearly, and lead to policies that address reality in rational ways.

The foundation of Lavasa’s Geographic Information system, is the library of precise spatially-referenced data layers, intertwined through the ESRI’s GIS.

First city in India, to use the emerging Geospatial Technology, such as LiDar (Laser detection and ranging), advanced tools and the system, towards the development of precise & accurate referenced spatially data.

Advertisment

These geospatial data layers has provided a comprehensive representation of the Lavasa’s land and physiographic framework, land-use, infrastructure & facilities, transportation network, assets, environmental initiatives, green areas, parks & recreational locations and other featured information.

It has guided the development of the Lavasa master plan in a way that optimizes the use of resources in a sustainable manner and consistently delivered a return on investment including cost avoidance, time savings, increased accuracy, productivity, revenue, and better decision making.

GIS System: Meaningful contribution to the Value added decisions

Advertisment

Lavasa Geographic Information has directly contributed to meaningful and value added decisions in the following ways:

  • Detailed land base information system
  • Precise contour mapping
  • 3 Dimensional virtual data
  • Vegetation & tree canopy mapping
  • Periodic analysis on land use & land cover change detection
  • Detailed Infrastructure & utilities information system
  • Informative thematic maps for the intelligence-led city governance
  • Spatial and engineering analysis
  • Reliable construction monitoring via the apps
  • GIS- CRM- sales-CCC-projects integration
  • Network analysis, bus and transit routes
  • Parking management, vital during traffic management
  • ROW and easements detailing
  • Application development for projects and citizen call center
  • Citizen request and response management
  • True 3-dimensional models and visualization for helpful to the sales, tourism & hospitality
  • Surveying & geodesy and geological mapping

Each and every piece of land at Lavasa is mapped using GIS (Geographic Information) technology and the data is tagged to the respective lat-long on globe. That means the planners, designers, projects, sales and marketing, tourism and CMS back offices, has data on the owners of the land and owners of the lot, 3-dimentional data of physiography of the land and contours, elevation of area and other existing features, land and lot area measurements, vegetation cover and its growth analysis, building construction status and their updates with pictures, underground utility network and its detailed mapping up to the house connections and decision making thematic maps.

Entire data is then integrated through an application and made available to the internal users via the single window web based system. This application is not only providing the processed data but made available various analytical tools in order to analysis the data online. This helped departments and users in getting reliable data, better analytical capability online, thereby enhancing their productivity and time saving.

Lavasa GIS should be considered as unique model for all the smart cities that are coming up in India.

Advertisment