Assessment of Ahmedabad (India) and Shanghai (China) on Smart City Parameters Applying the Boyd Cohen Smart City Wheel

Abstract

The Indian Government launched a new urban initiative ‘100 Smart Cities by the year 2022’, under The Smart City Vision Plan, 2014, with a budget allocation of USD 1.2 billion for 2014–15 (PRNewswire 2015). The initiative revolves around the concept of new urbanisation or urbanism. Currently, no city in India or Asia, fully qualifies to be called a smart city, mainly because many parameters do not match the prevailing standards, either European or American. In China 311 smart cities are initiated for development by Chinese government and European companies in the 12th Five Year Plan (2011–2015), (EU China, 2014). Some works like, The Boyd Cohen Smart City Wheel (BCSCW) are a frequently cited tool to help cities, communities, and companies to become smart, innovative and a green economy. It covers six Dimensions viz. Environment, Mobility, Government, Economy, People, and Living divided into 18 ‘Working Areas’, factorised into 24 ‘Indicators’ and further factorised into 64 base level parameters (Cohen in The smartest cities in the world 2015, [1]). This paper makes an assessment of two cities, Ahmedabad and Shanghai using an extensive web based search, and assesses the degree of existing smartness of the cities based upon the BCSCW. Using weighted averages a composite city index for 27 matched parameters between Ahmedabad and Shanghai, has been calculated which enables us to view Ahmedabad and Shanghai’s performance against that of a global smart city benchmark of Toronto City. With this, the research aims at providing an idea of the current state of smartness of Ahmedabad and Shanghai vis a vis Toronto City.