Abstract
Cities in the Global South face rapid urbanization challenges and often suffer an acute lack of infrastructure and governance capacities. Smart Cities Mission, in India, launched in 2015, aims to offer a novel approach for urban renewal of 100 cities following an area-based development approach, where the use of ICT and digital technologies is particularly emphasized. This article presents a critical review of the design and implementation framework of this new urban renewal program across selected case-study cities. The article examines the claims of the so-called “smart cities” against actual urban transformation on-ground and evaluates how “inclusive” and “sustainable” these developments are. We quantify the scale and coverage of the smart city urban renewal projects in the cities to highlight who the program includes and excludes. The article also presents a statistical analysis of the sectoral focus and budgetary allocations of the projects under the Smart Cities Mission to find an inherent bias in these smart city initiatives in terms of which types of development they promote and the ones it ignores. The findings indicate that a predominant emphasis on digital urban renewal of selected precincts and enclaves, branded as “smart cities,” leads to deepening social polarization and gentrification. The article offers crucial urban planning lessons for designing ICT-driven urban renewal projects, while addressing critical questions around inclusion and sustainability in smart city ventures.
Highlights
Debates about the future of urban development and planning have been increasingly driven by discussions of smart cities (Batty et al, 2012; Hollands, 2008; Kitchin, 2014; Townsend, 2013; Yigitcanlar, 2015), with many smart city projects surfacing worldwide
The technology‐driven urban development pol‐ icy has made deep inroads in Asia, too, with more than 500 smart cities coming up across China (Bacchi, 2020) and 100 cities selected for development under the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) in India (Praharaj et al, 2018b)
This study critically investigates the smart cities development in India to highlight the inconsistencies between the promise and delivery of the technology‐ driven urban development model
Summary
Debates about the future of urban development and planning have been increasingly driven by discussions of smart cities (Batty et al, 2012; Hollands, 2008; Kitchin, 2014; Townsend, 2013; Yigitcanlar, 2015), with many smart city projects surfacing worldwide. Wiig (2015) suggests smart cities demonstrate a new form of corporate‐driven development where international firms are engaged in transporting urban technology solutions from one part of the world to the other, which McCann (2011) calls urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge Such approaches promote a one‐size‐fits‐all model of urbanism (Han & Hawken, 2018) that is a significant barrier to shaping a culturally sensitive and inclusive urban landscape. While smart city urban regeneration areas can create new opportunities for innovation and improve service delivery, they have proven to promote spatial inequalities by concen‐ trating resources and infrastructure in select enclaves (Caprotti, 2014) Such processes pose a barrier to design‐ ing sustainable and inclusive cities, especially in the Global South, where a significant share of urban popula‐ tions live in acute poverty (Teferi & Newman, 2017). This article addresses some of these contradictions in urban planning literature while providing a detailed case study analysis of India’s ongoing smart cities development
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