Under the Indo German Bilateral Development Cooperation, the focal areas currently are:
- Energy;
- Environment and Management of Natural Resources; and
- Sustainable Urban Development
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, and GIZ India are jointly
implementing the “Sustainable Urban Development - Smart Cities” (SUD-SC) project. The
project supports the National Ministry and the State Governments (Odisha, Tamil Nadu, and
Kerala) in the policy formulation on housing for all, basic services, planning framework, and
monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It also supports the three select
Smart Cities (Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, and Kochi) in implementing concepts of integrated
spatial urban development planning.
Cities in India, like their counterparts in the global South, are facing major problems in
managing its growth and infrastructure. As a result, improving social and economic
conditions for its citizens and promoting sustainable development is increasingly an urban
challenge. However, non-availability of city level data, especially those spatial in nature,
causes major hinderances during project conception, planning and implementation.
Consequently, new and innovative solutions are continually being explored for these cities.
SUD-SC aims at promoting integrated spatial planning by overcoming working in silos of
sectoral departments within the three tiers of government (national, state and city). To
connect the different dimensions of planning, there is an urgent need for a digital tool that
visualises spatial data from sectoral departments and provides access to such data for
cross-sectoral use and understanding. CityScope, developed jointly by the City Science Lab
at HafenCity University, Hamburg (HCU) and MIT Media Lab, US, is an interactive, digital
tool that helps to analyse urban relationships and enables simulations of development
(‘what-if’) scenarios. CityScope typically consists of a touch table and supplementary info-
screen.
In this context, GIZ plans to engage a competent IT firm to provide technical backstopping
for the CityScope. In collaboration with HCU, GIZ shall facilitate these activities in the partner
state of Tamil Nadu and the city of Coimbatore.
The objectives of this assignment are to:
- Provide technical backstopping for the CityScope device
- Handhold partner organisations
- Build the capacity of its users
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