A new development has been added to the list of towns being revamped, the “ Port Louis Smart City concept plan”. This urbanization project of Port-Louis has been presented and awarded at the Smart Island Congress in 2017 in Majorca, Spain, which gathered more than 70 islands. The capital city of Mauritius has been ranked first in one of the six categories, that of Urban development, ahead of other projects such as the “Sustainable Port of Spain” of Trinidad and Tobago and the “ Proyecto Enlace del Caño Martín Peña ” of Puerto Rico. This project has a greater framework and it tends towards the target to transform Mauritius into a Smart Island. LexpressProperty has seized this opportunity to highlight a second aspect of the Smart City : boosting existing territories.
Revamping towns
The Smart City trend is spreading in the hi tech and green worlds while trying to benefit each and everyone. This new innovation wave is flooding Mauritius since 2015 with Smart City projects, under the aegis of the Smart City Scheme, launched by the Board of Investment in partnership with the government – with the wish to create eight of them. Since then, the expression Smart City has gradually entered the daily vocabulary of Mauritians, with the successive projects, the last one being the Medine Smart City (officially launched on Thursday 7th September in Flic en Flac). However, another aspect of the Smart City is still unknown : re-urbanizing an already existing town. One of the multiple ways to create a Smart City is to transform a former town into a… smarter one. Many countries have taken to the rehabilitation of existing facilities, such as Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Singapore, and the have focused on a planned urbanisation in order to promote major issues - such as sustainable development and hi-technology sharing.
Transforming Port Louis into a Smart City
The Port-Louis project shows perfectly what urban planning aims at in the Smart City framework. It implies the private sector as well as the government. The outline of the Mauritian project is to reinforce the status of the capital city, to emphasize its cultural and historical heritage by refurbishing key areas (such as the Aapravasi Ghat and the Chinatown neighbourhood), to enliven the town and to promote connectivity. To achieve this, works will be undertaken until year 2021.
The ultimate objective is to “elevate Mauritius and place it on the world map, and solve the many issues in the cultural, urban, economical and societal fabric”. The Smart City mania has really entered the way of life the capital city and the towns of Mauritius !
Crédit photo: smartislandcongress.com
