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Socio-spatial implications of smart city development in India
Smart urbanism with a focus on equity and its special role at times of crisis.
Learning from the smart cities of the South to inform the global smart urbanism discourse in post-pandemic recovery—with significant benefits in strengthening existing, and building new connections between India and Australia in an area of bilateral national significance.
In 2015, the Government of India created the Smart Cities Mission which proposed development of 100 smart cities to address the challenges of urbanisation through smart solutions. More recently, during the global pandemic, India has recorded the world’s second highest number of COVID cases. COVID has pushed Indian cities to reshape their smart city efforts and leverage smart solutions and facilities in fight against the pandemic. For example, 47 cities across the country converted their Command-and-Control-Centres (built as part of the Mission) to COVID-War-Rooms to lead the city-level emergency response.
It is noted (Das, 2020; Deloitte, 2020) that the Indian smart cities have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to innovate, learn, collaborate, and find ways to enable evidence-based urban governance in response to the crisis. Critics, on the other hand, are concerned that ‘COVtech’ - as public-sector-led technologies of monitoring, management, and containment of the virus - violate data privacy protocols and can be used as surveillance tools (Kitchin, 2020) with devastating economic and social impacts on marginalized groups (Datta et al., 2020).
In this project, I argue that India’s ‘smart’ response to the global pandemic is multiscale and has different modes of existence; and further empirical studies are required to capture its complex socio-spatial implications. Critical investigation of the ways in which smart city development in India has been reshaped to fight COVID will shed light on the opportunities and challenges embedded in the smart urbanism in response to crisis.
The project aims to generate extensive new knowledge on the complex socio-spatial implications of smart city development; and the ways in which they have been further consolidated, expedited, and elevated in response to COVID, and to stimulate the pandemic-hit economies.
Informed by the insights from the in-depth comparative case studies, the project adopts a ‘right to the city’ approach (Harvey, 2008) to scrutinise how smart urbanism impacts different sectors of society and responses to the major urban challenges of the Global South including basic infrastructure gaps, inequity and inequality, and informality. The project builds on the earlier research on the right to the city in the Global South (Samara et al., 2013) and seeks to locate and conceptualise ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’ by focusing on the inequity implications of smart city development in India.
The learnings, although informed by the knowledge produced in the context of the Global South, have the potential to transform the smart urbanism discourse globally with a specific focus on equity and its special significance at times of crisis.
Project objectives
The proposed project has the following three research objectives:
- Articulate how smart city planning (including vision development, policy setting, and budget allocation) contributes to the complex and at times contradictory socio-spatial implications of smart city development. Specific attention is given to:
- the level of alignment between smart city planning and the strategic planning priorities already in place
- the citizen engagement processes embedded into the Smart City Mission with a focus on who is included and who is excluded.
- Examine the place outcomes of smart city implementations with specific attention to:
- the displacement and dispossession of urban poor (e.g. via slum clearance, and banishment of informal economy sector as part of the street ‘smart’ refurbishment)
- the role smart urbanism plays in establishing and expanding the educated middle-class (e.g. by introducing high-tech well-paying employment via creation of a massive IT sector) and in elevating the lower-class (e.g. by providing vocational training – mobile and community-based – for entry-level IT jobs).
- Identify the ways in which smart city development has been consolidated, expedited, and elevated in response to the crisis
- The project is perfectly timed to assess how smart city development efforts have been reshaped to fight the pandemic and to whose benefit; how class, caste, religion, gender and territory have been redefined in COVtech in light of the deep digital divide in India; who benefits from smart city development as stimulus to the pandemic-hit economy; and who is left behind.
- The project will gather valuable information on how civic society has been mobilised to reimagine alternative ways to use smart technologies and provide relief and support to vulnerable groups locked out/in Indian cities.
References:
Das, P. (2020). Smart cities are generally better equipped to manage emergency situations in the near future. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3kB7lDt
Datta, A., Aditi, A., Ghoshal, A., Thomas, A., & Mishra, Y. (2020). Apps, maps and war rooms: on the modes of existence of “COVtech” in India. Urban Geography, DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2020.1807165.
Deloitte. (2020). India Smart Cities COVID 19 Response. Delhi, India: Deloitte,.
Harvey, D. (2008). The right to the city. New Left Review, 53, 23–40.
Kitchin, R. (2020). Using digital technologies to tackle the spread of the coronavirus: Panacea or folly? The Programmable City Working Paper, 44.
Samara, T. R., He, S., & Chen, G. (Eds.). (2013). Locating Right to the City in the Global South. London: Routledge.
This project has been funded by: Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship (FT) 2022. Grant ID: FT210100422.