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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled A 100 smart cities, a 100 utopias from 2015 by Ayona Datta published in the Dialogues in Human Geography journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see the smart city application in India as it becomes the site of producing 100 proposed smart cities. This article investigates the technocratic nationalism, and the presence of young urban population influencing the smart city dream.

Datta started with a personal experience: she was approached to be part of a research for smart cities in India, and she proposed a direction that would have lead to recommendations for overcoming urban poverty, thus the urban poor becoming smart citizens. However, the answer to her proposal was a resounding no as the approaching organisation is not interested in such topics but the money to be gained from smart cities. She summarised the background of the smart cities in India – motivated by moolah, or money.

Datta continues to reinforce: there is a need for detailed analysis on the rhetorics of urgency. There seems to be a cycle: they do much of the work in sustaining the aspirations of rising urban middle-class youth, who, in turn, reinforces the power of the smart city trope. For Datta, exploring the city as a heuristic, as India’s experiment with modernity and globalization was interesting. The urban has powerful myth-making capabilities in Indian nationalistic space and challenging this myth is an important objective of her work on smart cities.

However, it would be misleading to state that smart city is only kept alive by the neo-liberal state or the money-seeking business partners. Smart cities are part of the dreams and aspirations of success of a young urban population who are products and promoters of globalization. This young but heterogeneous group includes software engineers, entrepreneurs, managers, PR consultants, and so on. This group is turning away from the conservative ruling parties, and for them to be patriotic is to be in the power of technology – creating a technocratic nationalism. For them, to ask questions of social, spatial and environmental justice associated with the smart city is to become anti-developmental and by extension, anti-Indian, allegedly an agent of the West.

Undoubtedly, there is a dogmatic faith in technology as a sustained feature of Indian nationalism and modernity. The first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru believed that through technological advancements with new industries, roads, bridges, dams and cities, Indi would achieve development and progress after centuries of impoverishment under colonial rule. However, the language of money is now translated by the state and the business partners into a make-believe modernity announcing India’s global position as an economic superpower. And it is precisely this terrain of rhetoric around smart cities that captures the imagination of India’s urban youth. Additionally, the storytelling power of the smart city trope is transformational on the citizen and their relations to the state.

Furthermore, there is no stopping with smart cities. Following closely the Indian announcement of creating 100 smart cities, other cities that earlier marketed themselves as eco-cities, new towns or financial tech-cities have also begun to market themselves as smart cities. There is also a competition to establish which city was the first smart city, since the ‘first’ adjective represents a particular maturity for the states producing them. Therefore, this adjective become subjective and political, and not based on any rigorous terms of reference, rather, it represents success in a race where the finish line is drawn to suit those who are in the race. Being first is associated with innovation, originality, authenticity, and inevitable capital accumulation. Being first is important before the smart city novelty slowly fades away for the Indian mobile youth and reveal the elaborate myth making behind the scenes.

In the race for 100 smart cities, the winners will be those who occupy the terrain first and thus attract the most capital investment. The losers will probably enter later in the race when the smart city idea already dried up and the technologies are starting to reveal their failures, basically, when the smart city becomes another cliché in the global urbanism. Moreover, the smart city parameters change every day everywhere so in India with new cities added or taken away, new committees and policy notes drafted and new investments made in the different sectors.

A critique of a previous article from Datta pointed out that utopian city making projects are not just limited to the postcolonial state but they have their roots in colonial practices of city making – examples of Calcutta and Delhi show the practice of mapping power and sovereignty over territories and populations. Datta continued this argument going further: India has a strong continuity of urban planning from precolonial to postcolonial sovereign power. Even in modern Delhi there are signs of its history. Another city, Dholera is a great example of how smart cities differ from place to place even though the intentions may be derivative from global images, like Singapore, Masdar or Songdo. Dholera is an assembly of global smart city discourses and practices but has a particular form because of the city’s strong postcolonial model of modernity, rationality and development.

This article starts from the smart city – a place that is imagined rather than the already existing material space of the villages that will make way for the smart city to come. The city-ness enforces a hegemonic knowledge production by making cities as the entry point of all critiques of urbanisation. Others also highlighted this problem and the inevitable result: the political interest, budgets and other resources are drawn to these fantasy cities instead of the real urgent needs, like sanitation, or shelter. This just enhances the inequality and the gap between the haves and have-nots.

Datta also mentioned that the first action of the Indian Smart City Taskforce was to visit Singapore to learn from their initiatives, but not Songdo or Masdar to learn from their mistakes. It seems the gathering information and help around smart cities did not include the everyday life of citizens and the sustaining of democratic and emancipatory citizenship beyond the representational spaces of the sanitized, orderly and programmable smart polis.

There are grass root approaches to create a better utopia though obstructed by the state. The Jameen Adhikar Andolan Gujarat – abbreviated to JAAG – movement tries to shape new political images of citizenship outside of city-ness. To have better results from smart cities than just the corporate interest, more ethnographic and participatory research is essential and imminent.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Smart city means different for different people and its aims can be various depending upon the initiator and moderator of discourses, corrupting or making them better.
2. It is important to acknowledge that smart cities will be different around the globe, but also to learn from other examples – the good and the bad ones alike.
3. Smart city needs to be moved beyond the simple business model for to better work for the citizens without increasing inequality and social gaps.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How have the smart cities in India turned out? Were their establishment right or wrong with the benefit of hindsight?
2. How can we make sure that the smart city initiatives are not corrupted? Is it enough to engage the citizens?
3. How can we make sure that our initiatives for better futures, let it be smart or not, do not increase the social gaps but rather decrease and solve those?

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