Looking For A City Park For Some Solitude? This App Will Do It For You….Very Soon

Bhubaneswar: An App and digital platform, currently under process of development, can help locate parks in the smart city to a traveller or a citizen who wants to explore the green spaces and spend some quality time there.

This digital platform/interface with the city map and insights is being developed by a team of Smart City Fellows who were in the city to explore public open spaces as part of their visit to Bhubaneswar Smart City.

This is the pilot project, which is being taken up in Bhubaneswar by the Smart City Mission.

The proposed App can help the user to browse through open spaces like parks, markets, heritage precincts, water fronts, transit nodes and streets and let them rate the quality of the open space as per the benchmarks developed in the database.

For example, if from among 10 major parks in the city, a park near the airport scores 6.5 out of a score of 10, then the city needs further improvements. Also, citizens and visitors can enjoy specific facilities offered there.

Users can use the proposed App to know the scores based on comfort, access, safety,  resilience, sustainability, culture and identity, citizen engagement and activities offered in public spaces.

The three Smart City fellows, Shubhashweti Sinha, Mansi Naidu and Kirti Kawale, who visited Bhubaneswar city and also explored the public open spaces said, “The design and assessment tool for public spaces will not only help in setting a benchmark across the smart cities under the Smart City Mission, but also the digital interface with citizen feedback and experts’ analysis. This information can be viewed in a geo-spatial map of all the public open spaces in the city.”

The App will be fed by inputs from the users, so that the assessment can be updated and new inputs in real time can be added to improve experiences shared by a new user.

Once made operational, the App can be customised as per the local needs of any ULB/City/Smart City for bench-marking of their open spaces.

It may be mentioned here that the Smart City Fellows of the Smart City Mission under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) are from various fields and are travelling across Smart Cities in India to gather experiences and create innovative ideas/tools for citizen-centric usable urban solutions.

Smart City Fellows, Shubhashweti Sinha, Mansi Naidu and Kirti Kawale, who visited Bhubaneswar are being mentored by well-known urban development expert Professor KT Ravindran and would be developing the tool by interacting with people and also getting their feedback on board.

While Kirti is an urban designer, Shubhashweti is an architect with Masters in International Cooperation and Mansi Naidu is an engineer in Electronics and Communication. Development professional Sadaf Sethwala is also part of the team.