Smart City & Smart Village
According to the data of ‘Our World in Data’, there will be 3.09 billion population living in the rural area and 6.68 billion population living in the urban area in 2050. The urban area grows fast since 1950.
With the majority of people moving to urban areas, the direct outcome is urbanization. The urbanization brings a variety of benefits to the society, such as creating employment opportunities, developing technologies and infrastructures, and improving educational and medical facilities, etc. However, it also results in some adverse effects, such as overpopulation in cities, water and sanitation problems, traffic congestion, depopulation in villages, and the increasing gap between rural areas and urban areas, etc.
The gaps between rural area and urban area are growing, especially in economic development, basic infrastructure and social welfare which lead to the increasing gap of rich and poor. More and more people are moving to urban area for better work opportunities and higher quality livelihoods which create more challenges for the balance of city and village.
As mentioned in the last blog, Smart city has addressed many challenges for urban areas, the digital transformation would be more important in the rural area.
Based on this situation, the smart village might be a solution. “Smartness” generally means installing digital infrastructures and utilizing the ICT tools and data purposefully to promote the quality of life. When developing smart villages, learning from the mission of smart cities would be an efficient way.
But, the “Smart” should be adapted to the local cultural and environmental contexts which are totally different in rural and urban areas, and even the outcomes of ICT are also different from village to village. While “Smart City” focuses on improving the overall efficiency and the existing infrastructure, the “Smart Village” are tend to build the services from scratch (Santosh and Ankit, 2018).
There are several definitions about the ‘Smart Village’ from The Pilot Project of European Commission:
Smart villages are communities in rural areas that use innovative solutions to improve their resilience, building on local strengths & opportunities.
They rely on a participatory approach to develop and implement their strategy to improve their economic, social and/or environmental conditions, in particular by mobilising solutions offered by digital technologies.
Smart villages benefit from cooperation and alliances with other communities and actors in rural and urban areas.
(EU institutions, 2019)
While both the smart city and smart villages focus on digitization, human-centred, and sustainable, they still have rather different contexts and challenges.
Despite the increasing value of the digital tools in improving the quality of life, especially the online services greatly boosting the economic development, the offline population living in rural areas are facing barriers to the digital adoption.
- Poor infrastructures
The poor infrastructures mean the lack of internet access, grid electricity, and well-established transportation system, etc.
- Low incomes
Since most of the young people have been moving to urban areas, the outdated economic system and the lack of labour lead to the low income in rural areas, which would increase the costs associated with spreading access to the Internet (McKinsey & Company, 2014).
- Low connectivity
Barriers in this part include two dimensions: 1) For the offline population, they are unaware of the value of the internet, and there are not strong cases that could show the values for them. 2) For service providers, they are facing difficulties in developing custom-made services. To sum up, the barrier is the low connectivity between offline population and online services.
References:
EU institutions (2019) Pilot Project on Smart Eco-Social Villages. Available at:https://digitevent-images.s3.amazonaws.com/5c0e6198801d2065233ff996-registrationfiletexteditor-1551115400783-pilot-project-smart-village-master-vs-20.02.pdf (Accessed: 01 May 2019).
Santosh, K.S. and Ankit, G. (2018) Smart villages: Driving development through entrepreneurship. Available at: http://www.forbesindia.com/blog/entrepreneurship/smart-villages-driving-development-through-entrepreneurship/ (Accessed: 08 April 2019)
McKinsey & Company (2014) Offline and falling behind: Barriers to Internet adoption. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/offline-and-falling-behind-barriers-to-internet-adoption (Accessed: 06 April 2019)
