Tooran Alizadeh’s research while affiliated with The University of Sydney and other places

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 implementation—as part of the Smart Cities Mission in India. The analysis unravels the diversity within the smart COVID response, as 125 COVID applications, 14 COVID-War-Rooms, and numerous examples of smart public place initiatives are discussed. The findings include a typology of COVID applications and shed light on the operations of COVID-War-Rooms throughout the nation. The learnings point toward a mostly top-down approach to smart COVID response. Yet, early evidence indicates the existence of an alternative subaltern smart COVID response to provide bottom-up support to the most vulnerable groups, filling the gaps in the top-down approach. More research is required to thoroughly understand the scope and scale of the subaltern smart response to COVID.

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 limitations of doing so. Intrigued by the fast pace of smart city development across the Global South, and informed by the ongoing critical debates and increasing empirical work focused on the unfolding of ‘smart’ in the Southern cities, we put forward a research agenda ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’. Through three lenses of expose, propose and politicise this research agenda articulates the smart city shortcomings from a Southern critical perspective to elevate the ongoing empirical studies on the subject, to shed light on the gaps in knowledge, and to produce a normative alternative vision for ‘just smart city’. Our challenge to readers is to help create such smart cities, to engage with and reflect on the arguments in this positioning piece, and then complement them with further normative, future-oriented work – informed by empirical knowledge – to fully map out the particularities of an alternative Southern smart city, to inform planning and policymaking for just smart cities, and to enact the right to the smart city in the Global South.

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 smart cities prioritised for implementation in the Smart Cities Mission, we show how informality challenges the understanding of the smart city. We analyse how this phenomenon is framed in smart city planning, focusing on the three domains of affordable housing, infrastructure services, and citizen engagement. We argue that using informality as a lens of critical analysis offers a new perspective on the ‘Southern theory’ of smart cities. In doing so, we highlight the disregard of informality at the cost of socio-spatial division – as a significant challenge for smart city development in India.

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.

This chapter synthesizes the learnings throughout this book and offers an integrated analysis of smart cities. It revisits the original question on the global state of smart city development and the ways in which this is shaped by the urban context. In particular, it focuses on the Smarter Cities Challenge and encapsulates the discussions throughout this book to understand whether and/or how geography (North–South divide), city size, governance (the levels of democracy), and (strategic) urban planning—each individually and in combination with each other—matter in the ways in which cities around the world adopt smart solutions. This chapter concludes by a conversation about future directions, informed by the global analysis of smart city development enabled via the Smarter Cities Challenge.

This chapter opens an introductory discussion by offering a literature-based overview of the global trends of smart cities worldwide. It points out the role that the digital corporations played and continue to play in the popularity and fast growth of smart cities. It provides a detailed description of how the IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge came about as a global enabler of smart cities. Nevertheless, this chapter turns the table by focusing on 135 cities participating in the Challenge. This chapter sets the scene for the rest of this book by providing an index of all participating cities. In doing so, it points out this book's limitation as it is, by no means, an all-inclusive narration of the “whole story” of smart cities. This chapter concludes by promising that the journey throughout this book will enhance our understanding of the state of smart city development worldwide.

This chapter starts by an overview of the literature that investigates the links between smart city practices and urban and regional planning. It builds on the question proposed in the critical literature on whether and how smart city development responds to or/and aligns with strategic planning challenges and opportunities in each city. This chapter offers an overall analysis of the participating cities in the Smarter Cities Challenge with reference to their planning context. This is followed with summary accounts of a few case study cities involved with the Challenge to provide tangible narrations of the ways in which participating cities have aligned or failed to align smart initiatives with their strategic urban challenges and opportunities. The overall goal of this chapter is to identify whether or how much planning matters in how cities around the world adopt smart solutions—with an attempt to control for socio-economic variables.