Technology and Innovations: Empowering Citizens for Future Liveable Cities

According to the UN State of the World Population 2007 report, by 2030, 40.76% of India’s population is expected to reside in urban areas. This urbanization causing for demands of new housing, industries, commercial establishment and civic infrastructure is putting high pressure on the existing inner-city areas. To solve these issues apart from good planning and design, good governance system, public engagement and empowering citizens play an important role for better city management. To understand the city level issues information about the urban systems to information at a lower scale need to be propelled to the citizens where technology and innovations are the strings linking different sectors. We planners and urban designers are utilizing technology to address the daily works and needs of the people to effectively predict and respond to chronic urban issues to create liveable communities and improving the overall quality of life. Not only provision of good infrastructure and continuous energy supply can make a city liveable but people need to be aware of the facts and the conditions and engage themselves in governance system by giving inputs, ideas and feedback during all the stages of the planning process. The paper will discuss different attributes and components of technology and innovations around the world that has empowered citizens in various sectors for making of better liveable place. This paper is based on the information available in the secondary sources about the application of various citizen engagement platforms such as mobile applications, online mapping tools, tech-enabled solutions, online services, websites, telecommunication system, location-based services and information, etc to enhance urban governance. Through a review of the current relevant literature, observational investigation of publicly opened web portals, applications and tools, this paper systematically highlights some significant findings. The present study suggests technology innovations empowers citizens that enables the entire urban planning process in a more straightforward way for attaining future liveable cities.