Smart city place-based outcomes in India: bubble urbanism and socio-spatial fragmentation

Exploring the Symbiotic Relationship between Digital Transformation, Infrastructure, Service Delivery, and Governance for Smart Sustainable Cities

“…Many projects are implemented on a small scale, resulting in isolated urban bubbles that exacerbate socio-spatial struggles [40]. This fragmented development often lacks coordination and comprehensive planning, leading to a lack of inclusivity and consideration for local contexts [39,41,42].…”

“…Firstly, the impact of digital technology on environmental and social sustainability remains marginal [34][35][36][37]. Secondly, the fragmented approach to smart city development lacks inclusivity and consideration for local contexts [38][39][40][41][42]. Thirdly, existing research on smart sustainable cities primarily focuses on philosophies and conceptualization, neglecting to explore the models and relationships between foundational city elements-infrastructure, technology, service delivery, and governance [16,26,43,44].…”

The right to the smart city in the Global South: A research agenda

“…The (re)appropriation of public space: Throughout the Global South, transformation of public space into ‘designer landscapes’ to sell the city in the image-conscious world of global neoliberalism has accelerated the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalisation of ‘unwanted’ others who encroach upon the aesthetic market-led and state-sanctioned expectations – by using public space as a site for the informal economy (Prasad et al, 2022). These post-public spaces have become sites of conflict, rivalry and contestation giving rise to ongoing tensions among street vendors, property owners and municipal authorities regarding who is entitled to use the public spaces and for what purposes.…”

“…We, however, acknowledge our collective 25-plus years of living, studying and working on unceded lands of the First Nations people in Australia -one of the few major countries located in the southern hemisphere and yet categorised in the Global North. Academic life in Australia has provided us with ongoing opportunities to conduct empirical urban research in numerous Southern cities and to think and write (Alizadeh, 2021;Prasad et al, 2021Prasad et al, , 2022 about the implications well beyond to inform contemporary urban studies. Here, we bring our collective lived and academic/ professional experiences from around the world, hoping for a future in which binary terms such as Global South versus Global North or smart versus ordinary are needed less.…”

Tightly Bound, Loosely Interpreted: Meta-Governance and Local Institutional Adaptation in the Implementation of the Smart Cities Mission India

“…Indeed, strategies such as those embedded within the Mission are viewed as deliberate acts of state-rescaling of power away from municipal governments (Jain & Korzhenevych, 2022), continuing previous trends (Ahluwalla, 2019; Kennedy & Sood, 2019). We acknowledge the very substantial and contentious debates about the motivations and implications of the “Smart City” Mission for India’s governance writ large (Chakrabarty, 2018; Chakravarty et al, 2023; Datta, 2015; Praharaj et al, 2018; Prasad et al, 2022). Nevertheless, our focus here is on an aspect of the Mission that has received significantly less attention: how this reform was interpreted and delivered on the ground and the associated reasons.…”