Effective City Planning: A Data Driven Analysis of Infrastructure and Citizen Feedback in Bangalore

TL;DR

This paper presents a data-driven approach to city planning in Bangalore by analyzing civic data on spending, infrastructure, and citizen feedback to identify key issues and improve municipal performance.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated analysis framework combining infrastructure data and citizen complaints to enhance transparency and decision-making in urban planning.

Findings

Low greenery in constituencies with high populations.

Contradictory rankings and complaints for footpaths.

Street lighting issues correlate with citizen complaints.

Abstract

Leveraging civic data, divided into 3 categories spending, infrastructure and citizen feedback, can present a clear picture of the priorities, performance, and pain-points of a city. Data driven insights highlight the current issues faced by citizens as well as disparity between government spending and quality of work, and can aid in providing effective solutions. City infrastructure; footpaths, lighting, and parks, describe the living quality of citizens and can be compared to the annual spending in these sectors to track effectiveness. Analyzing complaints ensures citizen feedback is taken into account during both long-term planning and in short-term solutions to pinpoint critical areas of improvement. Integrating an analysis loop and data driven dashboards can help in improving performance of municipal corporations, while adding transparency between citizens and the city officials. In the paper, constituency rankings across the city infrastructure indicated a low importance towards greenery in terms of Parks, where each constituency has less than 2% of their area as a park. As populations in these areas are already high and increasing, this is likely to worsen in the coming years. Comparing the results with complaints, surprisingly the rankings of footpaths in constituencies were contrary to the number of complaints in these constituencies, with high ranking constituencies receiving the highest number of complaints, which would require further analysis. In terms of street lights, the areas with low quality lighting were associated with a large number of complaints from citizens, indicating that action needs to be taken immediately. Overall, a text analysis of complaints across constituencies reflected the everyday struggles of the city with the top keywords 'roads' and 'vehicles', followed by 'footpaths' and 'garbage', which are both critical problems in Bangalore City today.