Negotiating urban entities: marginalized citizens, participation, and the Indian smart city

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ABSTRACT Smart cities in India guarantee the promotion of citizen participation in the urban transformation processes. However, when it comes to marginalized citizens, scholars find urban transformation processes undemocratic and limiting their participation in smart cities. Contrary to this, an emergent form of citizenship among the marginalized in urban transformations beyond digital governance has been highlighted by a few scholars in the Global South, especially India. Hence, this paper contributes to these discourses on postcolonial urban transformations by reflecting on the emergent forms of citizenship, understanding marginalized citizens’ participation, and the challenges they face within Indian smart cities. The study focuses on India's smart city, Bhubaneswar's Socially Smart Bhubaneswar (SSB) Programme, initiated in 2017, focusing on marginalized groups residing in slums. We use Ling and Dale's (2013) social capital and agency lens to explore how marginalized citizens engage with their city's social and spatial transformations. A qualitative thematic content analysis of in-depth interviews and focus group discussions collected from four selected slums of Bhubaneswar was used for the study. We found that the marginalized citizens, through top-down propulsion and constant efforts on bottom-up translation and collectivization, not only became collaborators of the state in urban transformation but also active and critical citizens addressing their community needs. However, marginalized citizens become active and critical in urban transformation, requiring certain manoeuvres. Moreover, if the programmes need to understand the marginalized positionality in the urban transformation and exclude them from becoming a part of the transformation, then bringing social change might not be possible. Thus, the study highlights the potential of commons-driven governance and the need to expand social capital and agency to promote social change and participation of marginalized communities in urban transformation. Highlights Postcolonial urban transformations reveal emergent forms of marginalized citizenship. Marginalized citizen engagement evaluated using social capital and agency lenses. Social capital and agency among the marginalized fostered commons-driven governance. Capacitated nested networks and collectivization foster bottom-up participation. Chatur citizenry (Datta, 2018a) traced within marginalized citizen’s participation.