In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast, I have a great conversation with Aditi Padhi, a Senior Associate in Planning and Smart City Initiative at infrastructure and urban development company, Surbana Jurong. Aditi tells us about her background in business and architecture, and her passion for Smart Community solutions, as well as why the concept is so important to her personally. She tells us how she sees India embracing Smart City initiatives, and we also talk in depth about two projects she’s worked on. We discuss how cities must carefully manage their resources, and the very real need to educate both citizens and local government administration and other professionals to be able to fully engage in and maintain Smart initiatives. We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of disaster management and multi-use facilities within cities. As always I hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed making it.

Listen here: 

What we cover in this episode:

• Aditi’s background in business and architecture, and her passion for Smart Community solutions
• Why Smart City concepts are so important to Aditi
• The concept of a ‘no dig’ Smart City
• How Aditi sees India embracing Smart City initiatives
• Two projects Aditi has worked on
• How cities must carefully manage their resources
• The need to educate both citizens and local government administration to be able to fully engage in and maintain Smart initiatives 
• The emerging trends of disaster management and multi-use facilities within cities

Quotes:

“The ‘no dig’ Smart City idea [is] that you don’t dig into the city you work with the surface of the city as much as you can.”

“70% of Indians will be living in cities, we are looking at 100 million urban population being added every 10 years.”

“We have to talk about how Smart Cities allocate their funds. Most of the time 80% of the funds go into these highly dense developed pockets… so it’s fund intensive and it fails because it doesn’t have the supportive infrastructure all around it.”

“The truth is that cities have limited resources and you have to engage all the various disciplines to meet all the infrastructure and service needs.”

“I think the education of citizens is very important. If people are not Smart the city will not be Smart, so why not start talking about this early on as early education?”

Connect:

Connect with Aditi at her website http://aditipadhi.com/ or via LinkedIn

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

Podcast Production by Perk Digital