Resilience and Urban Regeneration in Developing Countries, with Zaheer Allam

In this episode of the Smart Community podcast, I have a brilliant chat with Zaheer Allam. Zaheer was the co-founder of the 'Platform Citoyenne', and NGO that successfully stopped the proliferation of coal fired plants in Mauritius. He is today an Urban Strategist for the Port Louis Development Initiative where he contributed to the drafting of a 'National Regeneration Scheme' aimed at economically incentivising urban regeneration. The scheme was successfully adopted by the Government of Mauritius in the National Budget of 2018-2019. In this episode, we discuss Zaheer's background as an Urban Strategist and his interest in looking at how to regenerate cities. Zaheer tells us how he thinks Mauritius is currently embracing Smart concepts and the unique way they are encouraging Urban Regeneration projects. We talk about the importance of democratising not only access to data but also knowledge of data to create more sustainable, more resilient Smart Cities, as well as the challenges of being a small developing state facing the realities of mitigating climate change problems without the economic power to influence global climate change conversation. Zaheer then tells us some of the key things that need to be considered in urban regeneration and smart city projects in developing nations, and Why Westerners need to properly understand the context and priorities of different African places before prescribing Smart solutions. We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of autonomous cities and biotechnology in cities. As always we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it. Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community Connect with Zaheer on LinkedIn and find him on Facebook Connect with me via email: [email protected] Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital.