The Smart City Concept in Africa: Case of Zimbabwe

Abstract

This article seeks to interrogate the Smart City concept and its relevance to African built environment planning and management. Like many buzzwords of times, the Smart City concept is a notion whose rooting in countries that still lag in terms of development, is an aspect of great concern and requires scrutiny before generalisation. In an ideal environment, free from many ordeals, a Smart City is one that operates like a human machine and in which artificial intelligence has become the motor-generator for urban processes. It is a robotised city, a system whose subsystems speak to each other, communicating for progress. In such a city, the sectors and subsectors are very much interconnected and can be made to modularise or assemble as defined by the purposes of what needs to happen. In such a city, land uses, population mobility, circulation and flows (energy, water, transport, etc) are both centrally and locally coordinated. Developing such a city is a function of deep study of the human and non-human needs over a period, or an artificial superimposition of a system or model learnt elsewhere.