Discussion and Conclusion

Land use assessment that showcased urban growth has been phenomenal and would prosper with the help of initiatives that a growing economy like India would be providing. Accuracy assessment provided insights into accurate land use maps and their usability. Further GHG emission quantification would help toward the development of an indicator that would govern all aspects of sustainable development goals (SDGs) as described by the United Nations. In June 2015, the government of India has envisioned the development of smart cities through physical, institutional, and social infrastructures under its smart cities mission. That would help in understanding city growth and in improving quality of life. More possibly to improve socioeconomic cultural visibility of these smartcities to attract foreign investments. However, with this mission, there would be rapid urbanization as predicted, which means inadequacy of resources to match the rate of urbanization. The smart cities mission should develop an urban observatory to fill in the gaps in current land use and to monitor the sustainable goals of the urbanization process and all its dimensions and then create plans using these digital observations to improve strategies.
Strategies here are in the form of major components such as the following:
(i) Green field development through smart townships. A holistic land management approach should be used here.
(ii) Adoption of smart applications like transport, reuse, and recycle of wastewater; smart metering; recovering energy from solid waste; and so on. This would reduce pressure on nonrenewable sources of energy.
(iii) Retrofitting current cities to match the comfort and security offered by existing climate-resilient infrastructures by reducing GHG footprint.
(iv) Development of existing built-up areas through the creation of new combinations of land uses and improving infrastructure and amenities considering the location and needs of the citizens.
(v) Maintaining the carrying capacity of the city, considering he available resources for citizens’ use; otherwise, there would be increased GHG emissions.
This necessitates very efficient and citizen-friendly decision making through
(i) understanding integrated land use planning based on the carrying capacity of a city
(ii) improving public transit system and making it more citizen friendly (especially because of the large amount of GHG emissions from the transport sector)
(iii) improving and developing mass rapid-transport systems
(iv) improving the application of ICTs and forming an urban data observatory as enabling technologies.
As shown in analyses, most cities are facing a crisis in terms of senseless unplanned rapid urbanization. Environmentally friendly urban centers with basic amenities and advanced infrastructure (such as sensors, electronic devices, and networks) would stimulate sustainable economic growth and improvements in citizencentric services. This improvement in citizen-centric services can be realized if the data collected by the government and other stakeholders can be accessed and used by citizens. This could be possible by building different tiers of data repositories. Each tier would represent a specific need and a specific objective. This also includes developing a spatial database infrastructure that is connected and more accessible, forming an interconnected database network system or Internet of things, which, in turn, leads to huge databases that can be adopted for decision making with data security aspects in mind. This will eventually develop into an urban observatory. This would allow piling up of sufficient useful data in databases that would contribute to effective and coordinated governance, which would then support urban growth through improved economy and active participation of citizens. Although these cities are undergoing smart technological innovations through connectedness of data, this is limited to a certain network of users and should be used to focus on increased living comfort through providing adequate infrastructure, green spaces, and basic amenities to every citizen.