Urban observatory to guide city planning for Iskandar, Malaysia

Datuk Ismail introducing the smart city of Iskandar in Malaysia.

Iskandar city in Malaysia is halfway through a 20-year journey towards becoming Asia's smart metropolis, according to Datuk Ismail Ibrahim, Chief Executive, Iskandar Regional Development Authority.

"Along the way, we need to embrace new concepts, such as the 'smart city'," he said during the ASEAN Smart City Projects sessions at the Asia IoT Business Platform conference, explaining that Iskandar was set up in 2007 but that the smart city guidelines were only introduced in 2016.

The Iskandar Regional Development Authority has solutions for the major challenges it expects to encounter in bringing Iskandar into the digital age.

Although the authorities may have relatively limited resources, the strategy for Iskandar is comprehensive, with solutions identified for major challenges such as providing a conducive business environment and intensifying human capital development. Datuk Ismail shared that the smart city will be built along six dimensions: the economy,  environment, people, governance, mobility, and living.

"What is important is how to go about it given that we are working within limited resources, and our level of knowledge is limited," he said. "We make the most of what we have."

Key is to first understand the city's inhabitants and their culture, rather than replicating technology from other smart cities and introducing it without warning, he said. "We need to involve the people (inhabitants) even at the design stage," he said. "We must work in partnership with people and agencies...The need to collaborate extends not just from business to business (B2B) and government to government (G2G), but also people to people."

The city authorities identified 35 programmes that could be initiated to build community awareness of smart city services, among them the Iskandar Malaysia Urban Observatory (IMUO), river revitalisation project and an integrated water treatment plant. The IMUO, introduced in August 2016, is a ‘single window’ where information and data is collected, kept and analysed in a smart city framework for better policy decisions.

"At the end of the day it’s about connectivity, if you’re not able to build the necessary connectivity you’re not able to build the necessary capabilities, and therefore you cannot be competitive. It’s about having the right system," Datuk Ismail said.  "A measure of success of a smart city is that the people will truly benefit."

Towards 2025 Iskandar Regional Development Authority will focus on insights from the IMUO, Datuk Iskandar said. "At the end of the day we need to have our own agenda. If we try to be like others we are not really addressing why we are growing in the first place."