The smart city as a “digital turn” in critical urban geography has gone largely unnoticed in postcolonial urbanism. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence of new forms of postcolonial citizenship at the intersection of digital and urban publics. In particular, I investigate the production of a “smart citizen” in India's 100 smart cities challenge – a state‐run inter‐urban competition that seeks to transform 100 existing cities through ICT‐driven urbanism. By examining the publicly available documents and online citizen consultations as well as observations of stakeholder workshops in four of the proposed smart cities, I illustrate how a global technocratic imaginary of “smart citizenship” exists alongside its vernacular translation of a “chatur citizen” – a politically engaged citizen rooted in multiple publics and spatialities. This takes place through three key processes – enumerations, performances and breaches. Enumerations are coercions by the state of an urban population that has so far been largely hidden from analogue technologies of governance and governmentality. Articulations are the performances of smart citizenship across digital and material domains that ironically extend historic social inequalities from the urban to the digital realm. Finally, breaches are the ruptures of the impenetrable technocratic walls around the global smart city, which provides a window into alternative and possible futures of postcolonial citizenship in India. Through these three processes, I argue that subaltern citizenship in the postcolony exists not in opposition, but across urban and digital citizenships. I conclude by offering the potential of a future postcolonial citizen who opens up entangled performances of compliance and connivance, authority and insecurity, visibility and indiscernibility across political, social, urban and digital publics.
The UN-HABITAT III conference held in Quito in late 2016 enshrined the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with an exclusively urban focus. SDG 11, as it became known, aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable through a range of metrics, indicators, and evaluation systems. It also became part of a post-Quito 'New Urban Agenda' that is still taking shape. This paper raises questions around the potential for reductionism in this new agenda, and argues for the reflexive need to be aware of the types of urban space that are potentially sidelined by the new trends in global urban policy.
Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21 st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development.In India in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of Dholera, the first Indian smart city, I examine how global models of smart cities are provincialized in the regional state of Gujarat through local histories, politics and laws.
Original citation:The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published as: Datta, Ayona ( LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author's final manuscript accepted version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer review process. Some differences between this version and the published version may remain. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. access to social and cultural capital in specific localised contexts. Thus subjective perceptions of gendered, ethnic, and racial notions of "others" that are carried across national boundaries are reinforced or challenged as their encounters with "others" produce perceptions of marginalisation or empowerment in these places. This paper finally suggests that cosmopolitanism should be understood not simply through class but rather through access to power and capital in everyday localised contexts. 1 PLACES OF EVERYDAY COSMOPOLITANISMS: EAST-EUROPEAN CONSTRUCTION WORKERS IN LONDON INTRODUCTIONCosmopolitanism, in its most fundamental sense implies openness to difference. As the process of enlargement of social, cultural, and personal agendas, and as infinite ways of becoming open to "others" (Pollock et. al, 2000), cosmopolitanism has recently made a comeback in studies on globalisation and cultural politics. Traditionally, cosmopolitans have been conceptualised as elites (Beck, 2002;Hannerz, 2007) who "pursue refined consumption, and are open to all forms of otherness" (Hiebert, 2002, p212), but various scholars now suggest that global elites ironically have limited engagement with the "other", and a "rather 2 restricted corridor of physical movement" (Vertovec and Cohen, 2002, p7; also Calhoun, 2002) between global cities. A recent surge of scholarly work on migration focussing on migrants" transnational spatial practices (Kelly and Lusis, 2006;Wilding, 2007), social and political identities Mohan, 2006;Vertovec, 2001), and relationships with the State (Koser, 2007;Leitner and Ehrkamp, 2006;Morris, 1997;Zierhofer, 2007), suggest that working-class migrants while maintaining "intense linkages and exchanges with sending and receiving contexts" (Vertovec, 2001, p575) also perform varieties of cosmopolitan behaviours. Scholars now suggest that these "working-class cosmopolitans" (Werbner, 1999) are open to difference neither as an ethico-political project, nor as conscious choice, but as a practical orientation towa...
In my response to the commentaries on my anchor article, I have taken on board the key question of how and why India has become the site of production of 100 proposed smart cities. I forward a notion of ‘technocratic nationalism’ to suggest that it is the young urban population in India who have largely bought into the smart city dream. Whilst drawing encouragement from the largely positive commentaries on my article, I then take on three main critiques of the article – first, that it has inadvertently promoted a hegemony of ‘city-ness’ by focusing on the imagined smart city to be; second, that the smart city has strong connections with colonial urban planning and third, whether Dholera should be considered the first smart city at all. I suggest that the article’s city-ness and postcolonial links to India’s urban planning is both political and heuristic, since it is the postcolonial ‘urban’ moment where India has situated its moment of modernity globalization and economic power. I contend that the final critique is based on a misinterpretation of the use of the word ‘first’, which was always intended to reflect a politics of innovation among cities. Finally, I suggest that the other ‘gaps’ in my article highlighted by one of the commentators is not a gap, rather beyond the scope and objectives of an exploratory article such as this.
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