Regional Planning throws much impetus of land use activities, infrastructure and settlement growth across the area of land, to be either city or town. Thus today professional in regional planning use population and economic growth projections as an effective indicator for resource allocation, anticipate desired infrastructure and public services needs of the resident population. In today context the scope of work of urban and regional planning largely involves balancing economic activities, community basic needs with poverty alleviations and balancing ecosystem through environment preservation for the defined area with local administrations.
In India, Urban and regional planning becomes more apparent with the advent of the concept of SMART CITIES in 2014 with a mission to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local area development and harnessing technology, especially technology that leads to Smart outcomes. Area based development will transform existing areas (retrofit and redevelop), including slums, into better-planned ones, thereby improving the livability of the whole City. New areas will be developed around cities in order to accommodate the expanding population in urban areas. Application of Smart Solutions will enable cities to use technology, information, and data to improve infrastructure and services. Comprehensive development in this way will improve a quality of life, create employment and enhance incomes for all, especially the poor and the disadvantaged, leading to inclusive Cities.
Thus we set priority for conducting studies for SMART Cities are as follows:
- Integration of Planning theories for development plans of SMART Cities
- Developing execution plan of SMART City
- Preparation of Digitization layer of information for SMART Cities
- Integrating Urban sprawl and agglomeration under SMART Cities
- Spatial Planning under SMART cities (involving unified settlement and transportation network)
- Others