Buying into the Smart City Narrative: Discursive Engineering and Agenda Setting in South African and Indian Municipalities

• In Event: Who Knows? Smart Cities as Epistemology

Abstract

India and South Africa are two countries were the ‘smart city effect’ has been very strong in recent years. In India, the Smart City Mission launched by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 has created a nationwide state-driven competition among Indian cities to get labelled as smart cities and get access to governmental funding. In South Africa, international and national ICT-based developmentalist strategies have driven smart city-like municipal initiatives since the early 2000s. Drawing on an on-going research project on the provincialisation of the smart city narrative in India and South Africa, this paper first looks at the differences and convergences between the rolling-out of smart cityness in India and South Africa since 2000. Using a media analysis, it compares the geohistory of the phenomenon and the role therein of discursive engineering. I then focus on the South African case to discuss shifting agenda setting and various modes of existence of smart cityness in three different municipalities. Finally, I look at the role of social movements in shaping South African smart urbanisms.

Authors

• Ola Söderström, Université de Neuchâtel

• Evan Blake, University of Neuchâtel