Smart Cities are a bad idea in unequal societies like India

Is the “smart” city the “one size fits all” solution to the myriad problems that plague the cities and towns of the subcontinent? One quickly realises that it is not; rather, the “smart city” will evade the intolerable strains on public and private life posed by the ungovernable Indian city.

Excerpted from Janaki Nair:

“Though we don’t have a “smart” city yet in India, a 100 of them have been provided for in the latest budget, following the model of Gujarat’s Dholera. Gujarat’s Dholera, which is stoutly being resisted by — you guessed right — those who will be dispossessed, we see many real estate companies occupying the Internet with their offers of “smartness.” The enchantment with “smart” cities, which began with the previous Finance Minister, was significant enough to be made a part of the 12th Five Year Plan.

Needless to say, such ambitious technological visions involve huge finances, and once more, predictably, the mere thought of the quick millions to be made in building these dreams is leading many companies, not to say governments such as that of Singapore, to salivate.

Is the “smart” city the “one size fits all” solution to the myriad problems that plague the cities and towns of the subcontinent? One quickly realises that it is not; rather, the “smart city” will evade the intolerable strains on public and private life posed by the ungovernable Indian city. In order to do this, “smart” cities will design a new future for their inhabitants: “greenfield” sites will be made to ensure the homogeneity of its population. It is a scaling up of the “gated community” concept to the city level.

The dream of the “smart city” is a morally and socially indefensible one in a deeply segmented and hierarchical society like ours, in which the quest for meeting the basic needs of its citizens, even decades after independence, has been all but abandoned. The pursuit of smartness is merely another name for a technological escape from our bewildering and taxing social milieu. Meanwhile, emboldened no doubt by the success of many privately built gated communities, the Sanathana Dharama Parirakshana Trust from Sringeri has taken the pursuit of smartness to new heights. On offer at a site about 40 kilometres from Bangalore is the first exclusively Brahmin community township, a vedic village no less, with a temple complex, a Veda Pathasala, Goshala, alternative medicine centre, etc. Houses curving around the auspicious symbol of ‘Om’ will ensure its inhabitants protection from the rough and tumble of Indian democracy.

That such a space has even been imagined and advertised, (and by the claims of the advertisement “sold out”) in a nation which has, over the last century, been acutely and shamefully short on just and humane urban visions, is a defiance of democracy, and a mockery of the market’s “invisible hand.” It not only lays bare the bankruptcy of our collective urban imaginations, it reinvents the spatial brutalities of caste.”

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