Fractured smart cities: Missing links in India’s smart city mission

Abstract

The postscripts of smart cities have been written before its prelude. Inserting smart technologies in infrastructure to improve urban environments, smart cities emphasize data-driven approaches and evidence-based planning. While it asks for production of new vocabularies, new ways of thinking, and proposes new methodologies, smart cities have trivialized baseline surveys. The insignificance to baseline survey hides the existing and functioning cities and leads to appropriation of “smart in the box” technologies. The omission of baseline survey fails to revamp planning and governance techniques as well as management and delivery of urban services. India’s Smart City Mission runs through a similar fate. Despite changes in vision and approach towards urban improvement, Smart City Mission suffers from methodological apathy and produces fractured smart cities. In doing so, the paper explores how the idea of normative smart city shrouds urban complexities and heterogeneities and proposes solutions without comprehending the functional and existing cities. Drawing on cases of urban water and solid waste management in Smart City Dharamshala, this paper discusses how fissures in normative and functional smart cities are continually produced through broken, incomplete, and erroneous data that, ultimately, fails in creating robust and resilient cities.