: Last week Minister for Urban Affairs Manjalamkuzhi Ali, while inaugurating a presentation of the ‘Urban 2020: Shelf of Projects’ under the Kerala Sustainable Urban Development Project here, said the State government had started preparing for the ambitious task of getting the smart city tag drawn by the Centre.
However, the question uppermost in the minds of the residents is whether the city is geared up to take up the challenge of the Centre to make 100 smart cities in the country.
Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Kochi, Thrissur and Kozhikode corporations and Malappuram and Kannur municipalities have been chosen in the State considering that the developments in these towns showed a continuous urban character.
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City planners feel multiple measures have to be adopted for the city, especially having a Geographic Information System (GIS) database for providing data support for decision-making. An urban spatial information system is aimed at GIS-based multi-hierarchical database with application tools to support planning, administration and utilities management.
Regional Town Planner K.V. Malik says the city could emulate the example of the pilot GIS project implemented at Malappuram municipality by the Town and Country Planning Department. A fully integrated socio-economic data is a basic strategy to attain the smart city tag. For that, numerous methods must be used from obtaining a satellite imagery of city, cadastry, Global Positioning System, survey of non- spatial data and designing database.
The satellite images with a buffer area of one km could be obtained from the National Remote Sensing Agency. Similarly the cadestry could be procured from the Survey Department and the digitization done by the Kozhikode Corporation, he said.
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Likewise the GPS survey has to be done at one point per sq.km. The Ground Control Point is to be selected in such a way that the point is identifiable in an imagery, cadastral map and on the ground.
Mr. Malik said the non-spatial data should deal with information regarding the building, families occupying the building, and with the enterprises occupying the building such as identification of the enterprise, nature, operations, employment.
Other spatial data such as junctions, name of roads, assets like government buildings, educational institutions, religious institutions, transportation facilities, recreation facilities, municipal assets, puramboke, existing land use, proposed land use, name of hills, hillocks, peaks, rivers, streams, paddy fields, ponds, tanks, overhead tanks, bridges, weirs, transformers, electrical sub- stations should be included.