The Collaboration of Urban Stakeholders to Solve Public Problems in Smart City Development

In 2016, my colleagues and I were shocked when an accident happened to one of the students from our campus who was hit by a car while crossing the road on Margonda Raya Street, Depok. As one of the main roads in the city of Depok, Margonda Raya is heavily crossed by “violent” riders of cars and motorcycles. The accident made me curious and made me do a little research, which then I found that Jalan Margonda Raya was one of the roads categorized by the local authority as the “Black Spot”. It means that the road is prone to accidents, with more than 3 cases over the past 2 years.

From that incident, I realized that the accident not only became a problem for victims who were not careful when crossing the street nor the drivers who drove the vehicles above the speed limit. I believe that structural factors like government regulations also played an important role. The regulations might be not accurate or not formulated based on local communities’ aspirations.

My colleagues’ accident was only one example of the complex problems faced by urban areas. There are still many other social and environmental problems like floods, waste management, broken public facilities, etc. that should be faced (and solved) by the authorities.

There are several things that cause the regulations are not accurately formulated to solve public problems:

1. The ineffective procedure that may allow communities to raise their aspirations to the regulator,
2. Reporting platforms that haven’t fully functional and not yet known by the public, and
3. The communities weren’t aware of the urgency to express their aspirations.

At this point, I found out that the communities need to raise their aspirations, and it needs to be accommodated by the government through some platform. But is that enough to solve the problems? To understand more about this, we should identify the issues based on the approach that I found really interesting, smart city.

When we talk about smart cities, we might think about sophisticated technology, robotic stuff, and more techy solutions to solve human problems. Actually, it doesn’t only talk about technology, it also talks about the civilization of humans and economic growth in more complex urban settings and involves more on the human aspect. As Boyd Cohen said:

“Smart city is a broad, integrated approach to improving the efficiency of city operations, the quality of life for its citizens, and growing the local economy.”

But how does the smart city approach may solve regulation issues? I would say that it lays on collaborations between all stakeholders and the tools to connect them.

The smart city itself focuses on how urban mechanisms can effectively allow their citizens to express their concerns and aspirations by using the information and communications technology (ICT) and the internet of things (IoT). Those aspirations will be collected and then managed by the government as the data and evidence to formulate the regulation. Here, information technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) are the tools used by the government to maintain their citizens’ wealth, and on the other hand, will connect communities with the government.

Illustration source: freepik.com

This is where the private sector plays its role.

The perfect example of the private sectors’ involvement in developing a smart city is Qlue. As the local provider of comprehensive smart city solutions, they are expected to keep building a product as a basis of the information, aggregation of data, and quality assurance that suits the market. Thus, Qlue developed a mobile application named “QlueApp” which acts as a platform for citizens to express their concerns regarding social and environmental problems in their neighborhood.

As a private sector, Qlue is committed not just to run its business purposes, but also its social purposes through community functions. The community functions are defined by socializing Qlue products to the public users, raising public awareness and knowledge about smart city technology, and partnering with various stakeholders. Qlue also collaborated with diverse channels, like universities, community organizations, NGOs, enterprises, and government institutions.

There are several community activities that show Qlue’s commitment in forging collaboration for smart city development:

1. “Warga Cerdas”, a skill and career development program that involves public and private universities in Jakarta, Bandung, Malang, Kupang, Makassar, and Manado,
2. “World Cleanup Day”, an annual campaign with the global initiative and one of the multinational enterprises to tackle the waste issue,
3. “Smart Talk”, an online event that collaborates with government institutions, media houses, or community platforms which aimed to inspire and share our experiences in various things.

Qlue successfully got a number of positive remarks due to the collaborations which brought social impact to communities. For example, the “Warga Cerdas” roadshow has inspired more than 1.500 students from more than 15 universities in two months. Moreover, some of the universities have sealed a partnership with Qlue to conduct academic outputs and seminars, support the study process, curriculum advising, and talent pool hiring for their students. Those universities are also encouraged to conduct more research regarding smart cities, like governance systems, AI-IoT adaptation, digital literacy rates, etc.

But the most important thing about the smart city approach is that the functions and efforts will not be optimally implemented if there is no support from all stakeholders. It needs public participation, the government’s response, emerging of public research, and the technology provider as an enabler at the same time. It is very important to have synergy between those 4 stakeholders to develop a smart city.

Back to the traffic accident in Margonda Raya. We can analyze the solution using the “smart city” approach. The number of traffic accidents that occurred can be reduced with the data-based regulations developed by the government. On the other hand, Depok citizens should consider themselves as part of smart city development, where they need to participate in collecting the data by using technology. Meanwhile, the private sector and smart technology providers should collaborate with the educational institution to spread the knowledge, and keep innovating their products by conducting research together, so the impact would be comprehensive and sustainable.

In the end, I believe that collaboration and mutual relations between the urban stakeholders would be a key in solving public problems and developing our smart city, not just in Depok, but everywhere in the world.

References:

• Carbonnel, Julien. 2019. “SMART-CITY: Stakeholders roles and needs”. https://medium.com/@julien.carbonnell/smart-city-stakeholders-roles-and-needs-8e3679764d2a (July 15th, 2019)
• Dasika, Rohan. 2018. “Smart City Stakeholders”. https://www.theurbanloop.com/smart-city-stakeholders%EF%BB%BF/ (August 20th, 2018)
• Yandwiputra, Ade Ridwan. 2020. “Korban Kecelakaan Meninggal, 4 Blackspot di Depok Diintervensi” . Tempo. https://metro.tempo.co/read/1307027/korban-kecelakaan-meninggal-4-blackspot-di-depok-diintervensi
• https://www.digi.city/smart-city-definitions