Building Foundations for Smarter Cities: A Data Ecosystem Approach
Gayatri Singh, Champaka Rajagopal
In the recent years, practioners and researchers alike have debated the promise of Smart Cities for not enabling better quality of life for all, particularly in low and middle income countries. Critics have shown how siloed governance arrangements, technology bias and fragmented interventions in Smart Cities programs tend to exacerbate uneven development, increase disparities in access to basic services, and thwart equitable (re)distribution of resources, leaving city governments politically, administratively, economically and financially weaker. To address these challenges, the World Bank’s City Planning Labs (CPL) promotes an ecosystem approach to Municipal Spatial Data Infrastructure (MSDI) where technology solutions are integrated with human, legal and technical aspects. By mobilizing CPL’s successful efforts in three pilot cities in Indonesia, Semarang, Balikpapan and Denpasar (2017-21), this paper shows how MSDI brought governments closer to inhabitants during the COVID-19 crisis, creating wider demand globally for embracing ecosystem approaches to data governance for Smarter Cities.
Policy maker abstract: In the recent years, practioners and researchers alike have critiqued the promise of Smart Cities for not enabling better quality of life for all. Particularly for low and middle income countries, researchers show how siloed governance arrangements, technology bias and fragmented decision-making processes adopted by Smart Cities programs tend to exacerbate uneven development, increase disparities in access to basic services for all, and thwart (re)distribution of resources, leaving city governments weaker in terms of political, administrative, fiscal and financial management capacities than before. This paper argues that an ecosystem approach to Spatial Data Infrastructure is essential to provide foundations to the challenge of Smart Cities. It argues that rather than treat technology as an end, national and sub-national governments must envisage data solutions to go hand in hand with human, legal and technical aspects. In this regard, international organizations and national governments are advancing the concept of National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) as effective vehicles for facilitating seamless data development, information sharing, and collaborative decision making for economic and social development. NSDI has however, often been weakly implemented. We argue that the establishment of Municipal Spatial Data Infrastructure (MSDI) at the local-level is imperative for effective implementation of NSDI and for bringing governments closer to inhabitants of cities. By drawing on grounded practice efforts of World Bank’s City Planning Labs’ initiative to mainstream MSDI, we underline the importance of institutional arrangements, people, data and systems as fundamental building blocks for a robust data ecosystem at the local-level. Through CPL’s work in three pilot cities in Indonesia, Semarang, Balikpapan and Denpasar, we show how the MSDI approach offers long-term solutions. To conclude, we show how the success of this first phase of the initiative has created demand from seven countries across the world to adopt CPL’s MSDI.
Event: World Bank Land Conference 2024 - Washington
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