Deepti Prasad

• Postdoctoral Research Associate at The University of Sydney

COVID has expedited and expanded the already precarious smart city development in India with the multitude of ‘smart’ COVID responses—broadly known as CovTech—introduced since the early days of the global pandemic. This paper offers an analysis of the scope and scale of smart responses to COVID in the first 20 cities prioritized for smart city impl...

Urban research has increasingly embraced the Global South, as recent critical scholarship continues opening to Southern cities, scholars and ideas generated from the South. Here, we (the authors, two women of the Global South) think strategically about ‘the Southern urban critique’, ‘the right to the city’ and ‘smart cities’– as well as some limita...

Smart city initiatives are mushrooming across the Global South, yet their implications for urban informality – a distinct challenge of planning in the cities of the Global South – remain overlooked. Using the Indian case as a focus and drawing upon empirical studies in three cities of Bhubaneswar, Pune, and Chennai, which are among the first 20 sma...

Despite the bourgeoning of smart city initiatives across the Global South, their implementation and place-based outcomes remain understudied. This paper presents empirical studies in three Indian cities of Bhubaneswar, Pune and Chennai; three of the first 20 smart cities prioritized for implementation in the Smart Cities Mission. It investigates th...

Despite the proliferation of smart city initiatives in the Global South, their implementation and governance mechanisms remain understudied. Using the Indian case as focus, this paper analyses the governance structures, mechanisms, and processes utilised to create smart cities as part of the Smart Cities Mission, introduced by the Government of Ind...

Despite widespread practices worldwide and increasing research centred on smart urbanism, there is no universal definition for ‘smart cities’. More importantly, a growing line of research warns about the north-centric notion of smart city research which underestimates the fast rate of uptake in the global South. In a search for a contextually infor...

This critical commentary re!ects on a rapidly mobilised international podcast project, in which 25 urban scholars from around the world provided audio recordings about their cities during COVID-19. New digital tools are increasing the speeds, formats and breadth of the research and communication mediums available to researchers. Voice recorders on...