Vizag 2030

Whose Smart City?

In 2016, 20 out of 98 shortlisted Indian cities were selected as part of the Indian government’s ‘Smart City Mission’ — an effort to create urban regions that were highly advanced in terms of infrastructure, communications, and connectivity. Concerns about the \manner of building such proposals emerged, questioning how involved citizens were in shaping the visions of their cities.

With the global spread of the internet and smartphones, and the term Smart City becoming more omnipresent, citizen engagement and control over their immediate environments are a crucial facet of a modern democracy. Most Smart City projects in India have had top-down approaches with a strong focus on technological innovation, making this project’s focus on citizen engagement unique. Quicksand was tasked with engaging local citizens and gaining their buy-in to envision a safe, healthy, sustainable, dynamic, connected, green, equitable, and resilient city. We felt that the voice and presence of citizens within these imaginations of smart cities were missing — this is what we focused our efforts on while simplifying the complexity of the initiative to draw end-users/citizens in.

The Smart City vision for Vizag was divided into five verticals — Land Use, Mobility, Water, Energy, and Governance. Our research considered critical questions: How can smart cities be citizen-centered? How would I, as a citizen, engage with my smart city? Can citizens be engaged in shaping their cities? What if new public services are made available through a city portal? What if data is made available by the city to innovate new services? What if a city could enable responsive grievance redressal?

User-centred approach to citizen engagement

With its expertise in human-centered design and storytelling, Quicksand envisioned a citizen engagement campaign as part of Vizag's Smart City Vision that would:

• Engage with citizens
• Demystify  selected projects, making urban planning and its principles more accessible
• Seek public opinion
• Showcase government efforts towards smarter governance to garner investments in the city

As part of the Smart City vision, the client provided us with detailed, technical reports on the five verticals, which looked into the intersection of public health and quality of life, considering factors across energy, transportation, water, education, economic development, environment, and resilience. Our role was to simplify this knowledge into digestible information, articulate how the vision and plans impact different citizens, and present this as contextually relevant stories that invite engagement.

Our research was two-fold: first, we focused on understanding the complexities of these verticals and simplifying them. Second, we conducted field research to understand the ground reality and gain inspiration from Vizag’s context—its spaces, places, faces, and settings—to bring in local nuances and cultural flavours to build familiarity in our storytelling approach.

Our field immersion included interacting with different demographics of the city, consulting social and cultural experts, exploring visual cultures, culinary traditions, cultural hubs, public spaces, and popular tourist destinations, and gathering opinions about the Smart City project.

During our research recce, we studied the nature of media consumption and found that newspapers were a medium read by the entirety of the literate population. We zeroed in on print media, specifically newspapers, as the primary touchpoint of the campaign that would serve as a portal for public participation for the citizens of Vizag.

Crafting Informational and Contextual Narratives

To develop a user-centered approach in designing such a campaign, we first understood the needs, perceptions, and aspirations of the citizens. Then, we created narratives and characters that resonated with citizens. Finally, we visualised Smart City benefits as everyday experiences in the lives of the characters, projected several years into the future.

Visual narratives effectively conveyed and simplified technical information comprising AECOM's Smart City plans. Each of the five comics we created simplified the technical details of the five smart city planning verticals—namely land use, water, governance, mobility, and energy. These verticals became narrative devices, woven into day-in-the-life scenarios and easy-to-understand scenes.

A spectrum of characters and contexts was developed based on our field research, making the stories relatable for Vizag’s inhabitants. References to the city’s landscape, such as R.K. Beach or its colonial architecture, the city’s history, Vizag’s naval history and its many monuments, its culture, its various migrant cultures and communities, and various facets of the multicultural port city were woven into visual motifs, storylines, and easter eggs. We also incorporated concerns and aspirations of people on the ground, gathered during our recce—such as hopes for reduced traffic, better connectivity and mobility, increased job opportunities, or scepticism about displacement, pollution, and equitable distribution of benefits.

Even though the stories are set in the future, they refer to local landmarks, creating an easy reference for people in helping them visualise the Smart City. Setting the stories in the future enabled citizens to imagine a scenario when a Smart City project had come to fruition and was successful while being close enough to the present that they were easy to imagine and aspire towards.

To execute the comic strips, five different artists were commissioned to bring the scripts to life based on their own distinct approaches—and to demonstrate the diversity of India’s vibrant visual culture by exploring different visual styles. Local references, descriptions of city life, setting of family and relatable individual characters, and local slang were incorporated into these comics to maintain authenticity. For instance, the overarching narrative revolves around the life of the fictional Rao family and other characters in their social network. Based in Vizag 2025, their life events and experiences highlighted the salient features of the Smart City initiative.

The last frame of each story ended with a question with three-to-four options under it, followed by a call to action in the form of a number the reader could dial to record their answer. This data was then collected to generate quantitative data to assess citizen engagement on a smart city portal.

Public Engagement to Simplify Complexity

In addition to a public engagement campaign, we created a proposed roadmap of how to translate the campaign across different media. This work was ultimately showcased to the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister’s office and greenlit. The comics, well-received by the client and the Andhra government, were disseminated in English and Telugu as inserts in mainstream newspapers available in Vizag. Their easy access in newspapers, and the distribution in both languages, ensured that citizens across classes were alerted and involved.

The strength of this project was its ability to simplify complexity using contextual storytelling mediums, creating dialogue through an interactive and accessible platform. Citizen engagement in urban planning and research is now more relevant than ever, with several projects worldwide exploring the intersections of infrastructure, health, tech, and the environment through the eyes of citizens. The public engagement approach developed for this project can be adapted for similar projects aiming to trigger empathetic and inclusive approaches to designing citizen outreach and engagement.