10 September 2020, NIICE Commentary 5963
Sayak Roy
The smart city concept is the most established turn in urban-related research fields. The financial crisis of 2008 had made the dystopian city as people existing everyday reality. At that time, the real estate business already reached saturation, and the world was looking for something that can help to sustain the existing financial structure. The main idea behind the smart city was to transfer the governance from the politically elected body to the elite business community and use the city as a mechanism to accumulate capital. The prominent capitalist’s giant like – IBM and Cisco worked as the driving force behind such captivating turn. However, the smart city idea evolved through a series of back and forth ideas and paradigm transitions. At first, the smart city was believed to be an iconic city that would emerge as the role model of all the cities across the world. The transfer of power was not smooth as expected because, of course, the political bodies keep on foraging for the middle path, and the residents also protested significantly. Then, the smart city concept shifted its fundamental positions and started advocating for a smart city that builds on localized needs and context.
The proposed and developing smart cities of South Asian countries like – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal have unfortunately messed up with it. For instance, the Indian smart city mission website did not leave any space to mention that they understood the recent concept and opposed the ‘one size fit for all’ version of the smart city. At the same point, they also made it clear that the smart cities of India need to emerge as the center of financial capitalism, and the smart city can immensely contribute to this sector. The point here is, the smart city mission is advocating to provincialize the smart city concept but does not know how to retrieve the localized context methodologically and translate these things into policy formations. The article uses the example from Bhubaneswar, India and Kathmandu, Nepal as the two distinct cases of smart city development in South Asia.
Upgrading or Building from Scratch
Indian smart city list is an impressively dreamy list and needs certain retrospections. The list comprises of metropolitan cities, tier two cities like Bhubaneswar and Dholera of Gujrat. Here, an analogy can be drawn between Bhubaneswar, Kathmandu and Dholera. Bhubaneswar is the capital of Odisha province with historical significance, and is now modified as the smart city of India. Kathmandu, well-established city in Nepal, is also smart city oriented, and the remaking of Kathmandu started around 2014. On the other hand, Dholera smart city of Gujrat was not a city. In the case of Dholera, the land was acquired in villages located near the Gulf of Khambhat and was transformed into a smart city. Therefore, Dholera is the smart city that demonstrates the transformation of rural land into Smart urban city. These differences are more than provincializing, and instead, we need an entirely different theoretical framework to understand. Otherwise, the credibility of the analysis would be ambiguous.
Developing a Provincialized Understanding
The smart city mission is advocating the localized knowledge of the smart city but oblivious on how to develop a localized perspective. What is being done right now is just a flat reading of history, but rather it is imperative to do some dubious structure interviews, go for some yes/no based online survey and based on it produce even more dubious planned prescriptions. specific options can be opted to document a meaningful localized context.
First, the planner needs to consider oral history instead of the books that flatly documented cities history. For instance, the books on Bhubaneswar city’s temple is not crucially significant for the smart cities mission.
Second, the smart city plan has to understand the existing everyday geographies of cities and then start to develop a localized smart city plan. By everyday geographies, the resident’s everyday dynamics, mobility, consumption preferences, habits, place-making and the needs. However, what India is doing in the name of localized context is the population and the sewage services, traffic services rations. It’s high time, we start moving from these tacky methodological vantages and produce an analytical framework.
Third, the smart cities of South Asian countries still love the reference point of western cities or the famous big cities like – New York, Dublin etc. . The common people understanding of smart cities in India is that the city looks beautiful, decorated and ornated with lights. As a result, the aesthetics emerged as the central point of smart city understating. Unfortunately, the smart city discourse has not seen enough attention compared to the smart city mission run by smart city aesthetics.
In contemporary time, the smart city discourse triggered the debate on “does the world need smart cities or unsmart cities?”. Nevertheless, we first require a comprehensive methodology to understand cities, a sensible, safe, inclusive city is the need of the time. But if any fancy concept is stripping resident’s agency, decision making power through forced choices, exploitation, increasing inequalities, then we need to get rid of it.
