Spatial topology of urban policy assemblage: a post-structuralist analysis of making of India’s smart cities

Abstract

Drawing on post-structuralist theories of space, power and policy-making, I examine the policy processes enveloping Smart Cities Mission (SCM), a flagship scheme of the Indian central government. Following act as guiding research questions: How do practices of knowledge production over smart cities shape and influence the ongoing political process of urban decision-making in India? Through what spatializing and discursive practices are smart city policies unfolding in India’s urban sphere? What new forms of coercion, domination, resistance, and coexistence are being produced through this process? This line of inquiry seeks to move the understanding of smart urbanism beyond conventional critiques, such as, poorly mobilized citizen participation, exclusionary selection of projects, and narrow targeting of populations. The thesis is grounded in two years of fieldwork at sites of knowledge production and circulation over smart cities. Combined with contextual examination of archival material relating to policy frameworks, prescriptions, and technological solutions, the attempt has been to generate an ethnographic view into spaces where the urban problematic is framed in the language of smart cities. Four related plateaus have developed from this view: The first makes visible rhizomatic connections between stages of performing urban expertise and other heterogeneous elements, such as, informational/advertorial publications (both physical and virtual) that carry the narrative of these stages to the wider audience, and the awards that get bestowed upon municipal bureaucracy and representatives of federal government. The second sketches a topological space that takes birth with territorialization of smart city policies in urban India. This helps in conceptualizing the policy work of central government as a series of attempts at bringing city administrations within topological reach of consulting firms and international financing institutions and inserting distance between their elected and executive wings. Exploring the biopolitics of inserting “smartness” into the problem-space of urban governance in India, the third plateau presents a genealogical account of how the managerial technologies of power forms patterns of correlation with neoliberal capacity building of municipal administrations and attempts to install private regimes of urban governance. The fourth plateau attempts to map the desirous flows producing smart city futures in India, with a particular focus on how order-words in business media articulating a techno-managerial performance bring about an incorporeal transformation of a city into a smart-city. The thesis suggests that the consideration of critical alternatives in the urban needs to disengage with the signifier of smart cities as it builds rhizomatic connections with a performative realm which depoliticizes questions of exclusion. Also it suggests that critical research into urban needs to unmoor the primacy of smart as a signifier so that other ways 3 of responding to urban concerns get space in policy and planning. Hopefully, the thesis would generate critical reflection among the policy analysts as well as policy-workers, and thus encourage a shift towards more considerate ways of responding to the urban imperative.