Nairobi – Digital technologies alone are not enough to ensure smart urbanisation, warns Joan Clos, the executive director of UN-Habitat. Instead, a ‘smart city’ is a city that uses technology in a ‘smart’ way to reinforce what he identifies as the five pillars of urbanisation.

As the executive director of UN-Habitat Joan Clos wrote in a recent opinion piece, the major conclusion of Habitat III is that the model of urbanisation of the past couple of decades “has been far from ‘smart’ and sustainable”. Even the rapid growth of communication and digital technologies is not enough to ensure smart urbanisation. In fact the contrary: “A city that has an advanced model of technology but is badly planned, with outdated legal frameworks or lacking a good financial model, will only aggravate the dysfunction in the city,” warns Clos.

This is why Habitat III, which was held last October in Quito, Ecuador, concluded with the adoption of the New Urban Agenda, “an action-oriented plan based on” five fundamental pillars of sustainable and smart urbanisation. These are: (1) national urban policies that ensure sustainable urbanisation is led by national governments working closely with subnational governments, (2) establishing rules and regulations that ground urbanisation in the rule of law and force us to be more efficient about it, (3) urban planning and design that look at the relationship between the design of buildable plots and public spaces, (4) investing in a financial plan for urbanisation that takes into consideration municipal functions (such as an urban land registry and building codes), basic services such as sanitation and waste management, and complementary services such as education, safety and health, and (5) local implementation by local governments.

As Clos writes, ICT can play a large role in the deployment of the five pillars toward good urbanisation, and a smart city requires the use of technology to support these pillars. But "technology itself is not the cure-all of development", a smart foundation is.