Digital Modelling of Solid Waste Management: Application of the TOSCA Toolkit in the Indian Urban Development Context

Drawing on the background of smart city policies and general digitalization in the context of urban development in India, the paper discusses the potentials of data-driven tools for city planning and analysis. Exploiting the growing sources of geospatial and sociographic data, promising strategies for intelligent solid waste management on urban level can be lined out. Establishing a cross scale approach towards waste management, spanning from the source level to the larger scale of a city, can offer deep insights into patterns of waste created in a city, waste streams, types of waste, thus expanding the decision-making capacities for city authorities and local governments. To this end, digital tools play a central role which, on the one hand, enable the comprehensive convergence of complex urban data, but on the other also facilitate the inclusion and participation of a multitude of stakeholders and decision makers, including the wider public. On this background, the text introduces the Toolkit for Open and Sustainable City Planning and Analysis (TOSCA) – an open source GIS software developed by HafenCity University Hamburg – as framework for the development of specific solid waste management use cases, and their local-specific application in Indian cities.