Exploring inequalities of urban housing and basic services through the lens of COVID-19 and smart cities development: insights from Bhopal, India

Access to affordable housing and basic urban services is required to maintain social equality and is linked to the well-being and happiness of the citizens.Global pandemics, like Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), pose challenges to decision-makers in revisiting urban development policies to strengthen citizens' amenities and services.Bhopal, one of India's fast-growing million-plus cities (1.79 million at the 2011 census) and one of the first 20 cities under the Government's ambitious Smart Cities Mission, was a hotspot of COVID-19 pandemic cases in India.This paper attempts to determine the housing and basic services conditions at both cities and the local (municipal ward) level, taking Bhopal as a case study.The paper also examines the geographical inequalities in housing and basic services and explores their relation to the COVID-19 pandemic through deprivation indices and Geographic Information System (GIS) based analysis.The findings suggest that COVID-19 pandemic cases are higher in those municipal wards where housing and basic services deprivation indexes are low.People living in poor housing and lacking basic services find maintaining proper personal hygiene and sufficient physical distancing difficult, increasing COVID-19 cases.The results can help the decision makers to understand the geographical inequalities in housing and basic services within the city, its relationship with COVID-19 pandemic cases, and ongoing urban mission initiatives that can help to tackle the impact of similar health emergencies in the future.