Smart cities, backward frontiers: digital urbanism in India's north-east

Abstract

ABSTRACTIndia's Smart Cities Mission (SCM) launched in 2015 has awarded 100 smart cities nation-wide, proffering funds, compulsory corporate partnerships, and new configurations of urban governance. Perhaps most striking are the ten smart city bids from Northeast India, a region shaped unevenly by separatism, military occupation, and heavy economic dependency. Smart cities in the Northeast have been awarded with key exceptions to SCM rules. We take this to be a largely unprecedented experiment in digital urbanism in what Dunn and Cons (2014. “Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces.” Antipode 46 (1): 92–109) label ‘sensitive space’. Through a critical reading of the 10 smart city bids from the Northeast we make three arguments. First, despite the techno-utopian rhetoric, the primary aim of the SCM is integrating frontier space into national territory. Second, the extension of the SCM to the frontier accelerates the recalibration of the frontier into a market for corporate capital under the necessary stewardship of the Indian state, though the role for customary authorities in these arrangements is unclear. Third, with few other avenues for revenue generation and in response to perceptions of neglect, local authorities have used SCM bids to request conventional infrastructure rather than digitally networked projects.