India’s Smart Transform-Nation Mission: Enabling or Obstructing a Smart Citizenry?

• In Event: “Smart Infrastructure” as Relational Practice: Cities, Nations and Corporate Strategies in Framing Future Cities

Abstract

Instead of alienating ‘smart cities’ as futuristic utopias somewhere in the Global-North, this paper proposes analyzing how such apparent digitally inclusive discourse reactivates historical reclamations for socio-spatial injustices in Chandigarh, a highly segregated, yet widely celebrated icon of master-planning. Just like the City Beautiful’s heritage status, the current modernist enterprise illustrates how promises of digital infrastructure are instrumental for safeguarding inequalities. Considering recent policy and research scopes presumably re-focus on the ‘human side of smart’ I ask: what constitutes a smart citizen? Which rights are gained and which end once one is (dis)entitled from the realm of ‘smartness’? Further, could subaltern urbanism be fertilized or rather wretched by reinterpreting ‘chatur citizenship’ as a vernacular version? The inter-national genealogy, guidelines and performance of India’s 100 Smart Cities Transform-nation Mission are critically inquired in dialogue with bureaucrats, citizens in the mall, universities and bastis. Altogether, as smartness is corporatized, it reincarnates a classist divide separating those who could manage transactions in their smartphones, and those who are surveilled as encroachers in their former living (slum-free) or working places (hawkers-free). Importantly this has not stopped, but encouraged activists and artists to develop counter-strategies to the logics of smart participation, wherein solely affirmative assertions and no discussion or bottom-up solutions are welcome.

Author

• Michelle Ruiz