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Past, present and future of the Smart City in India: An institutional perspective
... Overall, research on intelligent social governance in India is based on the country's resource endowment and development stage, striving to use disruptive technologies to break through development bottlenecks. However, due to factors such as weak infrastructure, a prominent digital divide, and lagging institutional supply, the construction of an intelligent society still faces many practical difficulties (Kesar and Ache, 2024). In the future, while accelerating the construction of new infrastructure, India needs to pay attention to the inclusiveness of technological applications and prevent digitalization from exacerbating social differentiation. ...
This study focuses on intelligent social governance and its evolution in the digital age, using LDA topic modeling to analyze 8,469 publications from the Web of Science database spanning 2015 to 2024. It explores the transnational distribution and transformation of research topics. Key findings include: (1) A shift in focus from technology-driven approaches to institutional and people-oriented models, with innovations like digital twins and the metaverse altering social governance frameworks. Digital rights and algorithm regulation are increasingly critical, necessitating new legal and ethical standards. (2) National research priorities vary: the U.S. highlights inclusive development ; China emphasizes leadership and top-level design; India focuses on transformative growth through technology; and European countries prioritize sustainability and inclusivity, reflecting diverse political and cultural contexts. (3) The field is transitioning from isolated applications to integrated systems, enhancing diversity and optimization. (4) There is a gap in understanding technology-driven governance's mechanisms and societal impacts , underscoring the need for theoretical advancements and practical synthesis. The paper offers policy suggestions for China, stressing the need for Preprint submitted to Elsevier 2024 年 10 月 23 日 strategic design, institutional improvement, shared governance, technological advancement, and international collaboration. This research illuminates the general principles of intelligent social governance and aims to stimulate innovation and practical development.
... The cyber-physical systems "Smart City" are constantly evolving, integrating new technologies that allow cities to become even more efficient and environmentally friendly, such as the use of artificial intelligence for data analysis, the development of autonomous vehicles, the introduction of smart energy supply systems, and much more [11][12][13]. The cyber-physical systems "Smart City" can include intelligent analytical tools that allow cities to collect, process, and analyze large amounts of data to make more informed management decisions, such as analyzing traffic flows to optimize traffic, forecasting demand for utilities, identifying congestion and taking measures to eliminate it, and analyzing air quality to identify sources of pollution and take measures to reduce it [14][15][16]. Such cyber-physical systems are a key tool for achieving modern urban development goals and improving the quality of life of their residents. ...
The task of designing and developing a cyber-physical system "Smart City" is currently relevant for Ukraine. This study is devoted to the development of a method and subsystem for monitoring atmospheric air quality in the cyber-physical system "Smart City". The article develops a method for monitoring atmospheric air quality, which forms the basis for effective monitoring of atmospheric air quality in the cyber-physical system "Smart City" and allows making informed decisions on warning residents about the danger with recommendations for protecting their health. The developed subsystem for monitoring atmospheric air quality in the cyber-physical system “Smart City” collects data from the installed sensors of air humidity, air temperature, dust content in the air, air radiation background, air pollution level by nitrogen oxides, air pollution level by sulfur, air pollution level by carbon compounds, air pollution level by greenhouse gases CO, CO2, NH3, NO, PM2. 5, PM10, real-time transmission of the collected data to the data processing server, real-time processing and analysis of the received data using various analytical methods, visualization of the air quality monitoring results in the form of a city map with n districts displaying all air parameters. The user can select the air parameters of interest in the mobile application of the cyber-physical system. After selecting such parameters, the visualization of the air quality monitoring results is adapted to the user's needs: the measured value of the parameter selected by the user is displayed on the image of the district on the city map, and the mobile application displays a sound signal in the background and a flashing sign on the image of the district on the city map in the application, which signals a danger in this area of the city; clicking on this sign displays a notification on the screen about the indicator for which there is a danger and recommendations for protecting the health of residents in this case.
In recent decades, a dominant narrative has emerged in which cities are considered the most decisive places for the future of contemporary societies. In fact, institutional production of such futures grants cities a central function in the becoming of the world. The objective of this essay is to analyze and characterize the institutional construction of future scenarios for cities based on three dimensions, or pillars, of a proposal for an institutional analysis. These dimensions are regulatory, normative and cognitive. The construction of future scenarios can be useful for cities, but it is important to recognize that they are institutional constructions that respond to the interests of individuals or groups and thus reflect visions of the present that reveal the concerns and strategic dimensions of certain actors. In this essay I analyze and characterize a corpus of 101 future scenarios for 81 cities in diferent countries. The results demonstrate that the future scenarios for cities are institutionalized through the development of regulatory functions, value systems and cognitive and cultural frameworks for organizations and individuals.
While institutional analyses often assess whether collective action occurs, scant literature exists on key characteristics of institutional rules and how they affect collective action. Building on the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, this paper aims to identify rule directions and demonstrate how rule directions influence collective action. A rule direction is the particular direction that is provided to the decision-making process by the aggregated rules-in-use of a rule type. We compare two Dutch infrastructure projects, where collective decision-making either was or was not achieved. Our study demonstrates that rule directions provide a systematic and context-sensitive explanation for how institutions influence collective action. Collective action requires active agency regarding rule directions – i.e. (re)directing the diversity of positions, soft-closing the exit of boundaries, sharing and assimilating information, establishing process symmetry in aggregation, and managing reciprocity regarding scope – which can transform the institutional predisposition of sectoral action towards collective action.
Cities in the Global South face rapid urbanization challenges and often suffer an acute lack of infrastructure and governance capacities. Smart Cities Mission, in India, launched in 2015, aims to offer a novel approach for urban renewal of 100 cities following an area-based development approach, where the use of ICT and digital technologies is particularly emphasized. This article presents a critical review of the design and implementation framework of this new urban renewal program across selected case-study cities. The article examines the claims of the so-called “smart cities” against actual urban transformation on-ground and evaluates how “inclusive” and “sustainable” these developments are. We quantify the scale and coverage of the smart city urban renewal projects in the cities to highlight who the program includes and excludes. The article also presents a statistical analysis of the sectoral focus and budgetary allocations of the projects under the Smart Cities Mission to find an inherent bias in these smart city initiatives in terms of which types of development they promote and the ones it ignores. The findings indicate that a predominant emphasis on digital urban renewal of selected precincts and enclaves, branded as “smart cities,” leads to deepening social polarization and gentrification. The article offers crucial urban planning lessons for designing ICT-driven urban renewal projects, while addressing critical questions around inclusion and sustainability in smart city ventures.
Smart city imaginaries have emerged in southern cities driven by neoliberal logics in the urban space. Scholarly work in India has continued to engage with sweeping accounts of cities as opposed to detailed empirical studies of local projects. This paper attempts to address this gap through an in-depth ethnographic inquiry of a slum redevelopment project in the city of Bhubaneswar, India. The key objective is to understand the ways in which informal residents adapted to and changed smart city policies in India in recent years. Using an evolutionary lens, and drawing on participant observation; document analysis; and semi-structured interviews, the paper puts forth a descriptive cases that advances the notion that smart cities imaginaries have resulted in abrupt changes in the institutional context while getting entangled itself within the legal system. The paper also demonstrates how smart cities discourses counter-intuitively result in emergent spaces of resistance in the form of counter-hegemonic practices, thus allowing spaces for the evolution of new actors and imaginaries from unfamiliar territories. The paper concludes by discussing that city planning and governance pathways in India risk creating complicated path dependencies and rigid governance future pathways that may amplify conflict.
Urban investments in India over the past three decades have helped its cities advance in terms of improved infrastructure and better economic standards. However, the cities are simultaneously facing challenges of polarised and unequally distributed development benefits. This paper advances the inclusive cities’ agenda beyond the constructs of “pro-poor development” and develops a multidimensional evaluation and monitoring framework. Through the review and analysis of 20 smart cities in India, the paper presents the gaps and patterns of relationships within the critical factors of inclusion. The need to develop alternate development models that shall promote socio-economic transformation in smart cities in India is emphasised through this paper.
There is a growing consensus that the initiatives taken under the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) in India should be used as an opportunity to prepare models for Environmentally Sustainable Smart Cities (ESSC). While developed countries have earlier worked towards Sustainable Cities and now are moving towards Smart Sustainable Cities, the conditions in developing countries are different. In their current form, SCM guidelines appear to emphasize more on social and economic development along with governance issues using modern tools of information and communication technology (ICT). To ensure environmental sustainability of such large-scale development planning, after a two-stage screening process, 24 environmental indicators have been finalized (including 11 from the existing guidelines), which can be used to monitor various environmentally sustainable elements of smart cities. Accordingly, in the present study; a tentative framework has been developed using these indicators to arrive at a Smart City Environmental Sustainability Index (SCESI) on a 0–100 increasing scale, and the city’s environmental sustainability has been classified under five categories: Excellent; Good; Fair; Poor or Critically Low; based on decreasing SCESI. Using this framework, five Indian cities, which are currently being developed under SCM (Delhi; Patna; Allahabad; Varanasi; and Bhubaneswar), have been examined. The analyses indicate that while three of them (Delhi, Allahabad, and Bhubaneswar) are found in the Fair (SCESI = 40–60) category of environmental sustainability, two (Varanasi and Patna) are in the Poor (SCESI = 20–40) category. The SCESI developed may be used as a monitoring and diagnostic tool for planning and managing services connected with the environment surrounding human life.
Smart and eco-cities have become important notions for thinking about urban futures. This article contributes to these ongoing debates about smart and eco-urbanism by focussing on recent urbanisation initiatives in Asia. Our study of India’s Smart Cities Mission launched under the administration of Narendra Modi and China’s All-In-One eco-cities project initiated by Xi Jinpin unfolds in two corresponding narratives. Roy and Ong’s [2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell] “worlding cities” serves as the theoretical backdrop of our analysis. Based on a careful review of a diverse set of academic literature, policy and other sources we identify five process-dimensions for analysing the respective urban approaches. We show how the specific features of China’s and India’s urban focus, organisation, implementation, governance and embedding manifest both nations’ approaches to smart and eco-urbanism. We argue that India’s Smart City Mission and China’s All-in-One project are firmly anchored in broader agendas of change that are set out to transform the nation and extend into time. The Indian Smart City Mission is part of a broader ambition to transform the nation enabling her “smart incarnation” in modernity. Smart technologies are seen as the key drivers of change. In China the framework of ecological civilisation continues a 5000-year historical tradition of civilisation excellence. By explicitly linking eco-urbanism to the framework, eco-cities become a means to enact ecological civilisation on the (urban) ground.
Purpose of the study: Paper introspects, the challenges encountered in the making of Gwalior city as Smart city. It compares the key bottlenecks of Smart City Mission as policy in urbanization landscape to the ground realities of implementation for a non -metropolitan city. The article also outlines the various way-forward which Gwalior city designed in its ambit for successful implementation of Smart city project. Methodology: Dealing with methodology, the paper has been drawn on policy documents analysis, city selection process, Indian Government promotional materials on smart city, several Indian Municipalities and a number of public-private partnerships Main Findings: It emphasizes the major challenges of debt financing, Institutional, market & business, community engagement, urban policy, land acquisition and quest for ideas, innovation in urban and IT landscape and desirable solutions. Paper emphasizes all these multiple challenges that were encountered and efforts which were made to meet the implementation of Smart and sustainable city for Gwalior citizens. Applications of this study: This study will be useful for all those agencies who are involved in transforming cities into smart cities. The study will provide a background of various challenges in regard to Indian smart city paradigm and how those can be dealt with. This study will help in the area of smart city, sustainability, urban governance, etc. Novelty/Originality of this study: This study explores how challenges can be met in Indian perspective with special reference to Gwalior.
Purpose
The Smart Cities Mission (SCM) in India is generating significant interest among researchers and policymakers globally. Cities under the SCM, irrespective of their locations, size, capacities or local needs, are heavily investing in technological solutions to improve civic conditions. The purpose of this paper is to build a typology and urban classification system of these 100 smart cities using a series of key performance indicators (KPIs) around urban development and access to public services. The paper also systematically recognises the diversity of challenges facing these cities and assess whether a generic technology-based approach is adequate to address them.
Design/methodology/approach
A two-stage statistical process is employed in this typology building exercise – first, a cluster analysis is conducted to classify the selected cities, then a multiple discriminant analysis is used to characterise each classified city.
Findings
The urban typology analysis finds that vast disparities remain across India’s urban centres, located in different geographical regions, in terms of access to social capital and physical infrastructure. The KPIs around education, health and social services emerged from the analysis as the most significant drivers in the urban typology building process. The lack of basic community infrastructure, especially in the small-to-medium-sized cities in India, exposes the shortcomings of a one-size-fits-all technocratic smart city development strategy that assumes foundational infrastructure is already in place for technology to take effect.
Originality/value
The research methodologies developed in this paper offers a novel planning approach for smart city policymakers to devise place-based smart city interventions, acknowledging diverse cultures and specific community needs.
Institutions are strategies, norms, and rules embodied in public policies and/or social conventions. They reflect and establish expectations about who can do what, where, and how, and are often employed for resolving collective action dilemmas and other kinds of governance challenges. Given their salience, social science scholars have dedicated substantial effort to developing analytical approaches for understanding the design, function, and performance of institutions. Particularly valuable are approaches that generalize across institutional types and are versatile enough to be paired with multiple concepts, theories, and methods. This paper focuses on one such approach, called the Institutional Grammar. The Institutional Grammar is an approach for assessing the structure and content of institutions. It received limited attention immediately following its introduction. In recent years, however, numerous journal articles have been published that highlight the promise of the Institutional Grammar for supporting rigorous analyses of institutional design and associated outcomes within the context of various theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches. This article (i) reintroduces parts of the Institutional Grammar; (ii) summarizes the theoretical, methodological, and empirical foci of all journal articles published to date that address it; and (iii) presents an agenda for advancing the study of institutions using the Institutional Grammar.
India aspires to modernize through 100 smart cities and achieve higher living standards. They are projected as planned models for other cities to emulate and position themselves as growth engines. The government has devised specific criteria for smart cities and encourages intra-city competition and cooperation with private partners. This paper argues that the 100 smart cities strategy reduces cities to a neoliberal commodity, through which improving living standards and reaching sustainability goals are seen through the narrow lens of economic growth parameters, resulting in urban privatization. I suggest that this weakens the democratically elected governance process, leading to splintered infrastructure development that benefits the wealthy, further marginalizing the poor. Drawing on field research, I demonstrate that despite the aims of addressing India’s urban challenges through the Smart Cities Mission, it has embraced neoliberal and entrepreneurial urbanism, value creation, and profiting from the city, while reducing the role of municipalities, residents, and democratic stakeholders.
Smart city development has emerged as a favoured response to the 21st-century urbanisation challenges. A wide range of definitions surfaced over the last decade characterising the smart city, primarily pushed by the global elite corporations and influential academics. Simultaneously, a series of urban development expressions, such as digital city, knowledge city, eco-city is used interchangeably with the smart city, significantly mystifying the reading of the concept. This paper, first argue that smart city interpretation needs and requires the input and contribution of the local stakeholders. The aim of this research is to provide an evidence-based framework to capture the perception of local urban actors in India vis-à-vis their interpretation of smart cities given the existing urban conditions and the proposed developments under the 100 Smart Cities Mission. This research also examines the underlying linkage between the smart city and its conceptual relatives and highlights the ones with a significant convergence with the emerging urban agenda in India's Smart Cities Mission. The analysis presented in this paper show that to emerge as a holistic concept, smart cities definition models should engage with the sustainability and community issues, beyond the use of digital technology. The research reveals that the Indian urban stakeholders strongly associate the smart city concept with sustainable city and eco-city, much more than the technology-loaded phrases such as ubiquitous city and digital city. The first-of-its-kind inclusive approach developed in this paper to define smart city takes on the monopolies of top-down smart city definitions and support the democratisation of the rapidly proliferating concept.
Smart urbanism is a currently popular and widespread way of conceptualising the future city. At the same time, the smart city is critiqued by several scholars as difficult to define, and as being almost invisible to the naked eye. The article explores two urban spaces through which the smart city is rendered visible, in two UK cities that are prominent sites for smart urban experimentation and development. Bristol’s Data Dome and Glasgow’s Operations Centre are analysed in light of their iconic nature. The article develops a conceptual understanding of these flagship spaces of the actually existing smart cities through three interrelated conceptual lenses. Firstly, they are understood as a videological type of Leibniz’s concept of the windowless monad. Secondly, they are conceptualised as examples of banal and serialised architecture. Thirdly, these spaces and their attendant buildings are understood as totemic assemblages that point to newly emergent forms of elite urban power.
The smart city as a “digital turn” in critical urban geography has gone largely unnoticed in postcolonial urbanism. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence of new forms of postcolonial citizenship at the intersection of digital and urban publics. In particular, I investigate the production of a “smart citizen” in India's 100 smart cities challenge – a state-run inter-urban competition that seeks to transform 100 existing cities through ICT-driven urbanism. By examining the publicly available documents and online citizen consultations as well as observations of stakeholder workshops in four of the proposed smart cities, I illustrate how a global technocratic imaginary of “smart citizenship” exists alongside its vernacular translation of a “chatur citizen” – a politically engaged citizen rooted in multiple publics and spatialities. This takes place through three key processes – enumerations, performances and breaches. Enumerations are coercions by the state of an urban population that has so far been largely hidden from analogue technologies of governance and governmentality. Articulations are the performances of smart citizenship across digital and material domains that ironically extend historic social inequalities from the urban to the digital realm. Finally, breaches are the ruptures of the impenetrable technocratic walls around the global smart city, which provides a window into alternative and possible futures of postcolonial citizenship in India. Through these three processes, I argue that subaltern citizenship in the postcolony exists not in opposition, but across urban and digital citizenships. I conclude by offering the potential of a future postcolonial citizen who opens up entangled performances of compliance and connivance, authority and insecurity, visibility and indiscernibility across political, social, urban and digital publics.
The present paper tries to understand the causes behind the emergence of India's large agglomeration (or giant cities) and how these large agglomerations are linked with economic growth. In addition, the distribution of urban economic growth is measured by the estimation of poverty, inequality and pro-poorness. The paper suggests that the upcoming "Smart cities" in India will emerge as a greater platform for future development of urban India, only if these cities surely ensure smart distribution of the fruits of urban economic growth to the poorer section of urban dwellers.
India’s cities are projected to grow by 300 million people by 2050, but this demographic transition may exacerbate fragile communal and infrastructural tensions. To address these challenges, the ‘Smart Cities’ agenda attempts to leverage India’s rapid embrace of technology to generate societal positive developmental outcomes in urban areas that emphasize the use of Internet and communications technologies (ICTs). However, local, regional and national government agencies struggle to balance embracing technology with inclusive development that protects civil rights and liberties. While the benefits are often stated, the acceleration of technology use in urban development can also create exclusionary cities, and many technologies that drive India’s modernization have also facilitated riots and violence between communities. This article explores these contradictions, examining scholarship on Smart Cities and ICTs in the context of the 2015–2016 Patel/Patidar agitation in Gujarat. We conclude by offering forward pathways for the Smart Cities and mobile technology agendas that support inclusive urban growth and development in India but are also mindful of civil liberties.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to study globally successful public library systems with reference to their infrastructure, physical space, services, collection, processes, finances and best practices and recommend models, structure and minimum standards for smart public libraries of the upcoming 100 smart cities of India.
Design/methodology/approach
An email with 14 questions was sent to 50 public library system across the world. A sample of n = 18 responses were received.
Findings
The finding suggests that all the libraries have a central library and a good network of branch libraries across respective cities with adequate staff and collection to cater to the needs of the public. The size of the central library varied from 8,000 m ² (Cologne Public Library) – 86,000 m ² (Boston public library) and average size of the branch library varied from 200 m2 (Aarhaus) – 1,582 m2 (Barcelona). Monthly average users varied from 96,000 (Moscow) – 1.5 million (Toronto).
Social implications
The Indian public library system remains uneven throughout the country with varying levels of legislation, financing and quality of library services. Even a room with few books is considered as a library. The results of this study will help develop a quality public library system of global standard and ensure that libraries are transformed into knowledge hubs.
Originality/value
This study is a unique exploration in which different types of libraries are defined in terms of physical space, service, staff, collection based on a global model which ensures uniform growth and development of public library systems in upcoming smart cities of India.
Indian cities seem to be in transition regardless of the various sustainability challenges they have experienced in recent years. Globalization, market economy, and technological developments have brought economic, social and infrastructural advantages. However, population growth, proliferation of urban functions, insurmountable increase in size of cities, and environmental crises because of climate change have caused the cities to experience severe spatial, infrastructural and environmental ailments. Besides, the significant rise of Information Communication Technology (ICT) industries in the cities and their socio-economic and spatial influence have brought about inequitable development. At this juncture emancipation of a political will to build smart cities in India provides a new impetus for changing the planning perspectives and warrants a politico-cultural discourse to examine the prerequisites and paradigms, which could aid in development of smart cities in India. Drawing upon the stimulating mix of past experiences and prospective approaches across the world and discussions with experts in the political science, local governance and urban development, this explorative paper provides a discourse on the concept of smart cities, opportunities, challenges and the way forward to realize the goals of smart city development in a heterogeneous but democratically unified country like India. Based on the discourse, it is argued that the current urban governance system is not congruent for development of smart cities in India. Therefore, it is advocated that a cultural theory inspired politico-cultural mechanism be explored and crafted to assemble the requisite elements of an urban governance system that should enable the dynamics and cohesion needed for developing smart cities in India.
In response to policy-makers’ increasing claims to prioritise ‘people’ in smart city development, we explore the publicness of emerging practices across six UK cities: Bristol, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, and Peterborough. Local smart city programmes are analysed as techno- public assemblages invoking variegated modalities of publicness. Our findings challenge the dystopian speculative critiques of the smart city, while nevertheless indicating the dominance of ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘service user’ modes of the public. We highlight the risk of bifurcation within smart city assemblages, such that the ‘civic’ and ‘political’ roles of the public become siloed into less obdurate strands of programmatic activity.
Consultants, especially management consultants with their
expertise in markets and entrepreneurial thinking, have gained a new role in
urban policy. Urban politicians, facing ever-increasing international
competition as well as diverse urban crises, search for immediate solutions,
at times drawing on professional advice. This paper introduces the role of
management consultants in urban policy in the context of fast policies.
These new policies are often both developed over short periods of time and
built upon predesigned concepts. Taking six German cities as examples, I
frame the impact both of the duration of consultancy projects and of the
moment when the consultants leave as temporal aspects of expertise that
significantly influence how the external knowledge eventually shapes local
political practices. I show that short-term consulting first causes a
stimulus for change but then primarily results in an ambivalent amalgamation of
professionalization and selectivity as permanently fast modes of everyday
policymaking.
This paper is a response to and a commentary on Vanessa Watson’s paper on “African urban fantasies” in this issue of the Journal, which analyzes new urban master plans developed by international architectural firms and property development companies for many cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Taking Watson’s argument as an opportunity to think about current urban fantasies in Indian cities, this response offers three reflections. The first looks at the scale of renewal in the plans for African cities and argues that they represent a different order to similar imaginations of special enclaves, zones or gated communities that have become common in cities in the global South. The second reads these plans as a yearning not just for particular built environments and the economic lives they represent but also for a controlled and orderly city free of the messiness of democratic politics, guided by the visions of authoritarian city states such as Dubai and Shanghai. The third theme discusses the critical and exclusionary consequences of these plans in cities across the global South, whether or not they are implemented. Implementing them would realize the disconnect between these plans and the actual citizens of the cities they seek to reshape. Yet even if they just remain on paper, these plans play an important political role in shaping aspirations and urban futures, as well as the possibilities of a more inclusive urban citizenship in the present.
New visions of future cities, often graphically depicted as replicas of Dubai or Singapore and frequently promoted under the label of ‘smart cities’, are sweeping the Indian subcontinent, but increasingly they are appearing on the African continent as well. This response to Datta’s article draws the parallels and differences between what can be called ‘fantasy city’ ideas in these two parts of the world and warns of the consequences.
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 the place-based outcomes utilized to create smart cities under three categories of mega-, placemaking, and lighthouse projects. The results show varying levels of urban interventions contributing to ‘bubble urbanism’ – a fragmented combination of large-scale mega-projects and small-scale revitalization projects – with complex socio-spatial implications for smart city development in India.
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 India in 2015. The paper offers extensive empirical analysis in the three cities of Bhubaneswar, Pune and Chennai that are among the first 20 smart cities prioritised for implementation. We first analyse how the governance framework provided by the Smart Cities Mission in India unfolds at three spatial scales – national, state and local – with the intersection of the scales differing in the three cities. Second, our analysis of the new form of governance involving public–private actors shows the conflict of responsibilities on a local scale. In conclusion, we highlight the absence of collaborative governance and reduced capacity in local governments – as significant challenges for smart city development in India.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of ethics and technology towards safety of internet of things (IoT)-enabled system in smart cities of India (SCI).
Design/methodology/approach
The determinants that would impact on securing IoT-enabled system in SCI have been identified by the studies of literature. Some hypothesis has been formulated. A conceptual model has been developed. Hypotheses and conceptual models have been tested by a statistical approach through survey works considering the feedbacks of 331 usable respondents. The results have been discussed followed by explaining the implications of this study. A comprehensive conclusion has been provided at the end.
Findings
The validated results show that the trust factor has insignificant impacts on the system and technology use, as well as on the behavioural intention. The model provided could achieve 79% explanative power.
Practical implications
For ensuring safety and security of IoT-enabled devices in SCI, the ethical sense of the stakeholders of SCI has considerable impact on securing safety of IoT-enabled devices in SCI. The practitioner should, as such, be sincere to motivate the stakeholders to ameliorate the ethical sense of the stakeholders for securing safety of IoT-enabled devices in SCI.
Originality/value
A few studies in the areas of Indian smart cities, IoT and related ethical issues have been conducted. In that sense, this approach is deemed to be a novel attempt.
With an increasing number of smart cities initiatives in developed as well as developing nations, smart cities are seen as a catalyst for improving the quality of life for city residents. However, current understanding of the risks that may hamper successful implementation of smart city projects remains limited due to inadequate data, especially in developing nations. The recent Smart Cities Mission launched in India provides a unique opportunity to examine the type of risks, their likelihood, and impacts on smart city project implementation by providing risk description data for area-based (small-scale) development and pan-city (large-scale) development projects in the submitted smart city proposals. We used topic modeling and semantic analysis for risk classification, followed by risk likelihood–impact analysis for priority evaluation, and the keyword co-occurrence network method for risk association analysis. The risk classification results identify eight risk categories for both the area-based and pan-city projects, including (a) Financial, (b) Partnership and Resources, (c) Social, (d) Technology, (e) Scheduling and Execution, (f) Institutional, (g) Environmental, and (h) Political. Further, results show risks identified for area-based and pan-city projects differ in terms of risk priority distribution and co-occurrence associations. As a result, different risk mitigation measures need to be adopted to manage smart city projects across scales. Finally, the paper discusses the similarities and differences in risks found in developed and developing nations, resulting in potential mitigation measures for smart city projects in developing nations.
Speed is fundamental to shaping visions of the modern city and of contemporary urban life. Notions of speed and acceleration have produced distinct conceptualizations of rapid urbanization as a rush toward progress and opportunity. In this article, I examine what speed looks like from the margins, when seen through the struggles of young women in the urban peripheries who are coping with the precarity of working in the city, while negotiating deeply entrenched gender power relations within the home. By examining how speed is conceptualized through the trope of the “smart safe city” and what this means for those living in the digital and urban margins, I examine how a negotiation of time becomes fundamental to gendered life in the urban periphery. Using methods of time-mapping, participatory workshops, WhatsApp diaries, and in-depth interviews, I argue that for those in the margins, everyday life is entrenched in time struggles between the rhythms of the city and the rhythms of family life. Although the focus on the “smart safe city” in India mobilizes the logics of a technological fix, for young women the mobile phone is a significant technology to cope with daily time struggles. This article concludes that although transformations of ideas of speed and time in the smart safe city shape practices of measuring, visualizing, and representing violence against women through technology, those in the urban peripheries encounter and negotiate its spatiotemporalities through a slow violence of life that is invisible and unfolding over time and space.
Smart City (SC) strategies that aim at fostering sustainable urban development through the systemic implementation of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to appeal to national and municipal governments despite of increasingly skeptical academic debates. Especially in Asian emerging economies aspirations to create SCs are widespread, yet seem hopelessly illusionary in many cases and might actually harm rather than benefit most citizens. This paper acknowledges these critical views, yet also accentuates constructive perspectives on SC achievements that offer rays of hope especially for cities in less developed countries. We propose to emphasize influential process qualities of SC strategies, which can instigate broader governance and institutional transformations locally, rather than mainly looking at the technical product features of final SC settings. Refined conceptual distinctions between the product and process view on achievable outcomes of SC schemes are suggested which also borrow from evolutionary geography perspectives. To illustrate our propositions, the example of India’s Smart Cities Mission launched in 2015 is used. While the planned refurbishment of urban spaces in India is rightfully criticized by some, our own qualitative empirical research – a multiple case study analysis of five SC schemes in South India in spring 2018 – reveals several promising process qualities besides implementation deficiencies. Our study finds eight mechanisms of detrimental path dependency that obstruct SC progress, but also eight mechanisms of positive evolutionary change with respect to urban governance procedures. Making agents in emerging economies aware of these potential outcomes that reach beyond a mere urban technology focus can inspire more effective forthcoming SC strategies and policies.
India'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.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to outline the generic concepts and learning about smart cities and capture the varied perspectives of winning case examples in India. An attempt is made in the paper to study the available literature about smart cities and structure them into a synoptic framework of planning, design and implementation.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper has followed a case study approach and complied multi-facet 18 features of 99 winners of “100 Smart Cities Mission” in India to showcase trends and developments of tomorrow. These multi-facet features collectively provide a heterogeneous view of the future potentials of smart cities in India.
Findings
Findings of this research can contribute to shaping a number significant learning of different aspects of policy formation in India with respect to smart cities in view of the sensitivity of citizen participation in the individualized society of information age.
Research limitations/implications
The results and learning of this study have not been verified empirically through a survey and they are based on qualitative incidences in the submitted proposal. Further, the state of this paper is generic and there is a lack of city-specific context specification except for some illustrations of success stories and upcoming innovative projects.
Practical implications
This paper provides a better understanding of current practices fulfilling featured requirements of smart cities to identify opportunities for improvement based on the current state of the debate.
Social implications
The development of smart cities in India is expected to play an outstanding role in shaping the world of tomorrow. Although the focus of this development is on the actual needs and requirements of today; however, some trends and predictions of the future society can also be identified.
Originality/value
This paper is the original attempt to set the definition of developing and replicating smart cities in India based on decisive parameters and it contributes to meet challenges of urban planning.
India is confronting a surge in urban population in recent decades. This article is an endeavor to talk about the key issues to build future urban cities and to redeveloping existing infrastructure in existing urban areas. Further, the article discusses the difficulties in financing smart city projects in India. The government of India, under the leadership of PM Mr. Narendra Modi, has propelled a strong eagerness with the Smart City Mission in 2015 which has the sole objective of giving a better quality of life to the citizens of the country. Steps are being initiated by government for the transformation of over 100 cities into smart future cities. The present nature of government silos will represent a noteworthy test in the execution of urban development projects. To motivate and attract the increased private sector participation and investment in infrastructure projects it would be beneficial if the government funding were linked to the effort of developing projects as PPP.
Writing alongside Southern urban theorists, this essay argues that the emerging body of “theory from the South” must be simultaneously tied to the production of forms and theories of practice. It must ask: How can a new body of thought give us ways of moving and modes of practice? Drawing from the experience of Indian cities, three such modes of Southern practice are offered: squat as a practice not just of subaltern urbanization but of the state; repair in contradistinction to construct, build and even upgrade; and consolidate rather than focus on the building of a singular, universal network within services and infrastructure. The essay then offers a first set of shared characteristics that may enable us to think of a practice as “Southern”, and urges the expansion of a vocabulary of Southern urban practice. © 2019 International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
This article reveals the elite discourse coalition which frames the priorities and institutional arrangements of the Smart Cities Mission in India. After locating the SCM within India's neoliberal urban policy trajectory and the new elite coalition it encompasses I describe three separate elite discourses: Modi's technocratic nationalism IT and consulting firms' technological utopia and middle class urban citizenship. Together the discourses have: shifted the moral sphere of urban policy from inclusive rights to exclusive privilege, privatised governance instead of local democracy and turned digital technocracy into a simplified solution for structural problems of urban inequality. While the elite discourses contest each other on certain areas which could lead to delays and stops in Smart City projects, together they have left the imprint of an elite led governance arrangement for urban planning and development in India.
The increasing rate of urban population and deteriorating conditions of physical, institutional, social, and economic infrastructure in cities are demanding smarter ways to improve public utilities and services in India. Smart city development promotes an established, interconnected, and sustainable urban system. The Indian government has launched “100 Smart Cities Mission” for planned urbanization in the country. The “100 cities” have been selected from a two-round city challenge competition. However, some controversial viewpoints have made questionable remarks over the selection process. For the effective planning of smart cities, an exhaustive analysis is essential to find the existing critical infrastructure, key resources, and development trends. The purpose of this study is to aid city planners and decision-makers to determine city eligibility in a multidimensional way and to develop evaluation criteria for city selection process to meet the goal of smart city mission. This article proposes a weighted criteria model to assess the city selection eligibility. The factors are identified from the literature studies. Total interpretive structure modeling is used to analyze the complex interrelationships among the factors and to develop a selection hierarchy. The fuzzy MICMAC process is used to classify the factors based on driving power and dependence. The stabilized driving power is applied to calculate the corresponding weights for each factor. In study findings, the most driving, linkage and dependent factors are identified for analyzing city selection eligibility. The policy-makers, government officials, and decisions-makers would get benefitted from the study outcomes to select top “N” number of cities for Smart Cities Mission.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors influencing the citizens of India to prevent cybercrimes in the proposed Smart Cities of India.
Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual model has been developed for identifying factors preventing cybercrimes. The conceptual model was validated empirically with a sample size of 315 participants from India. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling with SPSS and AMOS softwares.
Findings
The study reveals that the “awareness of cybercrimes” significantly influences the actual usage of technology to prevent cybercrimes in Smart Cities of India. The study reveals that government initiative (GI) and legal awareness are less influential in spreading of the awareness of cybercrimes (AOC) to the citizens of the proposed smart cities.
Research limitations/implications
The conceptual model utilizes two constructs from the technology adoption model, namely, perceived usefulness and ease of use. The study employs other factors such as social media, word of mouth, GIs, legal awareness and organizations constituting entities spreading awareness from different related literature works. Thereby, a comprehensive theoretical conceptual model has been proposed which helps to identify the factors that may help in preventing cybercrimes.
Practical implications
This study provides an insight to the policy maker to understand several factors influencing the AOC of the citizens of the proposed Smart Cities of India for the prevention of cybercrimes.
Originality/value
There are few existing studies analyzing the effect of AOC to mitigate cybercrimes. Thus, this study offers a novel contribution.
The literature on Smart Cities has not as yet paid adequate attention to the rural sector, and the
potential in villages for creating smart and sustainable solutions for the 21st century. This paper
focuses on linking proposed smart city strategies to smart village policies to ensure that rural
youth have improved opportunities for employment through ICT initiatives to ensure digital
inclusion, using primary surveys undertaken in India. The motivation was to understand how
mobile telephony could be a catalyst to create Smart Villages in India, where young people can
chart out new pathways to realize their aspirations with regard to tertiary education and new
avenues for diversifying into rural non-agricultural employment. We use data obtained from a
household survey in villages in the states of Punjab and Tamil Nadu to examine the mobile phone
usage preferences of rural educated youth to identify the way forward in improving the accessibility
of services on the supply side. We make the case that where youth are using mobile phone
access to increase their social information base it is indeed possible that the new social media
groups formed by rural youth become a powerful conduit for generating new employment opportunities.
The key to accessing this solution is to use a demand driven model for mobile services
that would permit a bottom of governance model to generate sustainable growth of enterprises
and improved human development of these villages.
The advice of management consultancies on urban policy is particularly influential in moments of crisis involving entrepreneurial principles. As global experts, management consultants appear as appropriate assistants for steering growth-oriented, competitive urban development. In order to show how consultants turn the urban into an entrepreneurial project to be managed, I discuss the literature on urban policy and consultants then examine the activities of private management consultancies in six German cities. Empirically, I first explore the specificities of urban policy advice given by globally operating consultancies (their methodological approach and the projectisation of the urban; global networks and comparative–competitive thinking; fast databases; reputation; externality). Second, I critically reflect on how the consultants’ advice is fundamentally reshaped by local actors in the process of policy making (through participation, appropriation, slowdown and politicisation). The paper thus critically evaluates the rise of expertise–policy relations and calls attention to mechanisms for patching the fractures of the entrepreneurial city.
This paper attempts to demystify and deconstruct the current Smart Cities craze in India. It does so by refusing to be distracted by the discourses of the Smart Cities idea in general and of the Smart Cities Mission of the Government of India in particular. It focuses instead on the privatized physical spaces of urban inequality in India, specifically gated neighbourhoods and integrated townships. It argues that just as these privatized spaces have increased in size and complexity over time, their corresponding legitimizing ideologies have also evolved and become more sophisticated, to finally give birth to their newest avatar – Smart Cities. Seen in this light, Smart Cities appear less as a novel idea floated to guide the sustainable development of our future cities, and more as an ideological cover for the ongoing processes of neoliberal urbanization. The paper buttresses these arguments with an analysis of the design process of integrated township projects that I have been involved in, comparing the essential characteristics of these projects with the operational aspects and components of the Smart Cities Mission.
With Rapid progress of wireless technology, the daily life of the citizens has undergone drastic change. They are using sophisticated devices based on latest technology for their daily usage at homes. This lucrative facility is available especially to the citizens of modern cities of the world. India is also not lagging. Government of India has announced for creation of 100 Smart Cities where the citizens are expected to use Information and Communication Technology with the help of internet. More use of internet by the citizens would enhance more internet penetration and here Internet of Things (IoT) plays a crucial role. However, tapping into the IoT is mere a part of the story. It is necessary to combine IoT with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in ‘Smart Machines’ to simulate intelligent behavior to arrive at an accurate and reliable decision without human intervention. Now combining AI and IoT information systems has become an essential precondition for achieving information system success. For information system success, it is essential to identify the factors affecting it. The purpose of this study is to identify those factors affecting successful implementation of information system enabling IoT coupled with Artificial Intelligence in the proposed Smart Cities of India (SCI).
In 2015, the government of India allocated more than $1 billion for the development of 100 smart cities. These cities are forecast to help alleviate the mounting pressure being felt in India’s existing urban centers as a result of rapid growth in urban population. According to estimates, it will reach 850 million residents by 2050. The Smart Cities Mission also marks a continued shift for urban development policy in India away from direct government intervention. This artice is an exploratory overview of the new Smart Cities Mission through an examination of the quantitative and qualitative attributes of participating cities. This is accomplished by exploring the differences between India’s selected smart cities and a cohort group of Indian cities. Additionally, a content analysis of submitted smart city proposals is conducted to determine the key strategies chosen by India’s smart cities and the type of projects being proposed to achieve a smarter city. The results reveal the cities selected for the Smart Cities Mission are larger, have lower percentages of residents living in slums, and have higher levels of public services. Additionally, these cities have largely adopted projects that seek to provide basic urban infrastructure as opposed to truly embracing smart city ideas and concepts.
This is the introductory chapter of Contesting the Indian City: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local, which examines the changing dynamics of political power in Indian cities and their implications for the spatial and social development. In doing so, it addresses a relative lack of academic attention to the political economy of post-liberalization Indian cities. The chapter develops a framework for analyzing urban political change in India through a review of both India-specific and comparative literature on urban politics. Through a review of the studies in this volume and other recent literature on Indian cities, the chapter argues that the process of neoliberalization of Indian urban politics has progressed, albeit tentatively and incompletely, through two channels. A further ambition of this volume, beyond developing frameworks for understanding urban change in contemporary India, is to explore the implications of India's case for comparative studies of urban politics.
With the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, urban-led economic growth in India was firmly framed around a vision of ‘smart cities’, an ambiguous concept, which promotes the integration of information and communication technologies in cities to improve economic growth, quality of life, governance, mobility and sustainability. Given its current policy importance, this article examines how the smart cities agenda in India has emerged, what it has encompassed and its potential for transformative urban development. Reviewing policy documents and statements in combination with selected key stakeholder interviews, this article traces the emergence of the smart cities discourse in India, suggesting that the vision and concept of the smart city has shifted over time and has been evoked in different ways to serve different purposes. Overall, the smart cities agenda in India appears to be characterized by a failure to conceptualize and develop an integrated set of policies, and while a clearer (yet contested) concept is emerging, the prospects for success are uncertain.
Indian policymakers have been slow in responding to changing metropolitan forms and have largely visualised urbanisation as city expansion. As a result, metropolitan regions, which are complex entities with multiple municipal and non-municipal institutional arrangements, have become mere creatures of state governments with neither the necessary strategic flexibility nor political legitimacy. In part, this is because the 74th constitutional amendment of 1993 has failed to visualise the dynamics of large complex urban formations. This paper suggests both a need to confront this blind spot in the 74th constitutional amendment for long-term durable solutions and to creatively work through available legislative and institutional arrangements in the short to medium term.
This chapter examines the role that power structures and political networks play in urban governance processes in India and how elite urban actors mobilize to take advantage of economic and political conditions in order to attain particular goals. The chapter focuses on two elite taskforces — the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF) and its successor, the Agenda for Bengaluru Infrastructure Development (ABIDe) — which the Karnataka state government created to shape Bangalore's future development agenda. Using these taskforces as an example, the author demonstrates how government officials (in this case, consecutive chief ministers of Karnataka) used personal social networks to mobilize powerful elite groups in a coalition to pursue specific economic and developmental goals (for example, making Bangalore more attractive to foreign and domestic investment).
This essay takes as its provocation a question posed by the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser: “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” In urban studies, this question has been usefully reframed by Neil Brenner to consider what is critical about critical urban theory. This essay discusses how the “urban” is currently being conceptualized in various worlds of urban studies and what this might mean for the urban question of the current historical conjuncture. Launched from places on the map that are forms of urban government but that have distinctive agrarian histories and rural presents, the essay foregrounds the undecidability of the urban, be it geographies of urbanization or urban politics. What is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global political economy and deconstruction as a methodology of generalization and theorization.
In this paper, we describe our application of Ostrom et al.'s ADICO syntax, a grammatical tool based in the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, to a study of ecological restoration decision making in the Chicago Wilderness region. As this method has only been used to look at written policy and/or extractive natural resource management systems, our application is novel in context (a value-adding environmental management action), data type (in-depth, qualitative interviews, and participant observation), and extent of institutional statement extraction (we extract rules, as well as norms and strategies). Through detailed description, visual aids, and case-specific qualitative examples, we show the usefulness of the ADICO syntax in detailing the full set of institutional statements-in-use: rules, norms, and strategies. One of the most interesting findings is that we found norms (and not just rules) to be prevalent and particularly meaningful guides for people's actions. This reinforces the need to address norms and strategies, not only rules, when developing effective policy.
Available at: https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/50469
India’s smart city plans have much in common with ‘high-tech’ and ‘intelligent’ city developments elsewhere. Among the similarities with the Multimedia Super Corridor in Malaysia in the 1990s is the role of seductive language and technologically utopian imaginings of the future in legitimizing land acquisition and dispossession. Geographers need to continue to look critically at smart city discourse and its inequitable socio-spatial effects. It is also important, however, that geographers consider possibilities for more progressive smart technology-enabled futures. The case of Malaysia shows not only that the implementation of smart and intelligent city projects faces resistance but also that socio-technical outcomes tend to exceed the plans of corporate and political interests.
Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. In India, in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of Dholera, the first Indian smart city, I examine how global models of smart cities are provincialized in the regional state of Gujarat through local histories, politics and laws. First, I argue that Dholera smart city is part of a longer genealogy of utopian urban planning that emerged as a response to the challenges of development and modernity in post-independent India. Second, that Dholera highlights a shift towards an ‘entrepreneurial urbanization’ in a regional state interested in scaling up a ‘Gujarat model of development’ for emulation at the scale of the nation. Finally, that in Dholera ‘speed’ is a relative term across its scales of manifestation from the global to local, where short ‘bursts of speed’ in conceptualization and investment is matched by significant ‘bottlenecks’ via local protests. The article concludes that Dholera’s fault lines are built into its utopian imaginings, which prioritizes urbanization as a business model rather than a model of social justice.