Sustainable urban development: The concept of smart city

In the imagination of any city dweller in India, the picture of Smart City contains a wish list of infrastructure and services that describes his or her level of aspiration. To provide for the aspirations and need of the citizen, urban planners ideally aims at developing the entire urban eco-system, which is represented by the four pillars of comprehensive development-institutional, physical, social and economic infrastructure. This can be al long term goal and cities can work towards developing such comprehensive infrastructure incrementally, adding on layers of ‘Smartness’. A Smart City would have a different connotation in India than say, Europe. Even in India there is no one way of defining a Smart City.