Smart City Strategy: Workshop On Smart City Strategy For National Urban Policy

A Consultation Workshop was held for Smart City Strategy for National Urban Policy (NUP) in Myanmar. The Workshop on Wednesday in Nay Pyi Taw is for the pilot phase of the National Urban Policy Programme: Developing NUPs and Smart City Strategies.

The process of developing the Smart City strategy for the National Urban Policy (NUP) for Myanmar follows the template of UN-Habitat described as the “Smart City Strategy Guide”. In Myanmar, urban concentration in 3 major cities, Yangon, Nay Pyi Taw and Mandalay is accelerating, resulting in such issues as highly densified unplanned cities, over-pressured demand for municipal services, shortage of affordable housing, poverty, mobility challenges and climate change.

This workshop focused on the validation of the need of a smart city strategy for Myanmar, discussions and validation on two approaches to SCS in Myanmar and identification of smart elements for brownfield and Greenfield pilot projects.

Deputy Director General, Department of Urban and Housing Development, Aye Aye Myint said “Our Ministry of Construction has been working to get national urban policy with the support from UN-Habitat, and also working on national urban policy program since 2017 with the assistance from Korea. In 2016, we made urban diagnosis, and in 2017, we got urban policy formulation. So, this workshop is national level. The outcome of this workshop, the national urban policy draft, will be discussed in World Urban Forum in 2020 in Abu Dhabi.”

This workshop included presentation on Smart City Approaches at City Level for Yangon, Mandalay and Nay Pyi Taw.

Country Programme Manager, United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Bijay Karmacharya said “So smart elements are very easy to get for it if we do the forward planning and forward thinking.” “we are talking about planned expansion of the city in Yangon and planned expansion of the city in Mandalay so there are a lot of planning going on. When we are in the stage of planning, if we are considering smart elements in our planning, a lot of things can be done very well. So I do not see big challenges”.

Smart City means utilization of the information, communication, innovations and the technologies existing in the world in order to make the cities better, efficient, livable, productive and also connected.