Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Home is where the heart is. This golden proverb stands universally true. Modern town planners see the essence of the proverb in a house which is safe and cost-efficient.

“A secure home can only exist in the city of tomorrow, popularly known as a smart city that envisions and meets the needs which its inhabitants will face in the future,” says Prof Dr Shaker Mahmood Mayo from the City and Regional Planning Department of the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore.

He says contrary to traditional cities, where most of the tasks are met manually, smart cities are automated and technologically done. The world is slowly turning to smart cities, and Pakistan needs to take a leap towards the modern housing.

The smart cities concept is the late 20th century which is equipped with sensors, meters, appliances, personal devices, and other similar gadgets. Such cities integrate data into a computing platform that allows the communication of such information among the various city services for efficient delivery.

In recent decades, there has been a boom in real estate in Pakistan: both investors and residents have shown uptrend in the housing sector. But most of the housing schemes have been following the last century town planning rules. At best they offer gated communities, commercial centres, wide and tree-lined roads, upscale shopping malls, and utilities like water, power and gas. Their streets are manned by fierce-looking armed guards, whose presence on streets is often a source of anxiety and does not help much to tackle street crimes and house robberies. These services also come at a heavy price; the more upscale services the town offers the more charges inhabitants are to pay. The round the clock power supply, the uninterrupted utility supplies often add heavy expenditures to the residents’ pocket as line losses and other losses due to leakages and delayed fixing are all passed on to the residents.

Sheikh Saleem returned from the US in 2010 and bought a house in a posh area of Lahore. In 2014, his life became hell as whenever it rained, his bedroom would accumulate rainwater. Plumbers spent endless days to find the leakage but failed to find the point. In 2016, he sold the house at less than the market price to shift to some other house only to find peace.

“Such problems occur and can be detected in hours, days or weeks,” says Muhammad Adil, a housing technology consultant. He says since water and sewerage pipelines are laid down by different agencies and contractors, plumbers and town management may find difficulties in finding the leakage. “The cure to such leakages lies in sensors and detectors, which detect such leakages in seconds and pinpoint the exact location of the problem. Once the problem is detected, it is up to the relevant people how early and efficiently they fix it.

He is executing Pakistan’s first ever smart city – Graceland Housing – near the new Islamabad airport. Adil says it is not the utility services that can be safeguarded through using technology, but also house security, traffic and transportation management, health management, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement, information systems, schools, libraries, hospitals, and other community services. The whole eco-system is connected through the telecom technology and one can oversee these services just through their smartphone.

“Being connected continues to become cheaper and cheaper, as the cost of providing such a service keeps falling. Connectivity is capturing an ever smaller proportion of the information value chain, while content, service, and product deliverers capture ever-more,” he says.

The serial entrepreneur, mentor, co-author of “New Success Secrets”, “L.E.G Formula” and the founder of Global Social Entrepreneurship Foundation, Muhammad Siddique lives in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He says a smart city is the most modern living trend. As an overseas Pakistani, he wanted to invest in a smart city. He has several reasons to justify his plans: “My house in a locality will be safe for I can watch my house while living in the USA. I can respond to doorbell from here; I can allow a certain technician (who has censor tagin) to go to my house and fix a fan in the kitchen. Once the technician tries to go to some areas other than the kitchen, the censors will alarm me and the community security. Similarly, every vehicle of the residents is censor tagged. Those without tags can be stopped at the very first barrier. These barriers and home doors are automated controlled. In all, I’ll be at peace that my house is safe, and everything within the locality is being closely watched.”

Does the close surveillance breach privacy?

“Absolutely No,” says Director of Graceland Housing, Shahzad Zafar. “It is not CCTV surveillance; only automated sensor tagging works for such services,” he said.

When the world is turning fast to such urban areas that use different electronic data collection sensors to supply information which is used to manage assets and resources efficiently, Pakistan’s public urban town regulators have yet to accept these changes.

Spokesperson for the Lahore Development Authority Sohail Janjua said the authority had nothing to do with smart city idea as “we are only to follow government regulations”. Capital Development Authority Media Director Muhammad Saleem also said that they had not reached the age of smart cities.

Prof Dr Shakir Mahmood, however, says that the public sector needs to realise that it is the age of information and concepts IOT- (Internet of Things-) based city infrastructure will become the talk of the town.

“The cost (of living) will certainly go down and the level of service usage will greatly increase by using sensor and detector technologies,” he says.

Published in Daily Times, January 29^th 2018.