Integrating Technology, Innovation and Equity: A Paradigm Shift to the Built Environment Approach

Smart cities have made global impact and developing countries are adopting smart urban solutions approach for rapid transitions. Accordingly, governments have also been initiating new policies to create smart cities with a singular focus on efficiency and competitiveness. Cities are the engines of economic growth and has always been the primary arena for production and use of new technologies as elucidated by stalwarts like Lewis Mumford. Smart technologies are too different from historically developed technologies used in the last two centuries for providing various services in the city. Present technologies would no doubt make cities competitive but at the same time gaze into all aspects of our lives. The paper propounds the challenging task of exploring the wide scope of advanced computing technologies to benefit populations and the natural environment so that the principle of ‘No one left behind’ is followed in every developing countries. The paper explains the need of innovative developments which could be leveraged to enhance access to housing, services and infrastructure to all citizens. Developing nations face greater exacerbated challenges than other nations such as lack of infrastructure, population growth in urban areas, no urban services such as drinking water, sanitation, health or education, no building capacity and poverty. As a consequence, western countries models of development should not be blindly adopted, but rather shaped and modeled to fit the local realities The paper provides an in-depth insight into the impact of embedding smart technologies in the built environment through inclusion of case studies of developed and developing countries and juxtaposing their successes and failures in the built environment.