FOREWORD 1
Important books can be important in many different ways. Smart City in India, beautifully and rigorously written by Professor Manoj Parmar and Dr. Binti Singh, is important in a way that makes me even more grateful to the authors: it accepts the challenges of the big picture, and it does that competently. Among those challenges, one of the most difficult to deal with is this: when you set yourself out to make sense of a complex phenomenon as a whole, you need a point of view on it. In this case, the level of complexity of the phenomenon under scrutiny, contemporary forms of urbanization and urban policies in India, is just overwhelming. The authorsā point of view comes out gradually in the reading and shapes up harmoniously through all the threads which reality is made of: in particular, recently introduced public policies and planning ideologies that turn out to reiterate less recent intellectual, political, and economic mechanisms, which they ultimately contribute to further establish in the pulsing body of India.
The authors, significantly an interdisciplinary collaboration between an urban designer and an urban sociologist, look at the Smart City Mission (SCM) in India, introduced in 2015, with a good deal of intellectual freedom, which allows them to get past the thin layer of paint cast over the public discourse by sometimes genuine ideological drivers, as well as clever communication strategies. That results in the construction of the context in which the observed phenomenon occurs, first of all its historical context. Far from indulging in criticism at the ideological level, the authors place the SCM into this context in a way that, page after page, makes such criticism unfold by its own force of evidence, on the basis of facts; connections that are evident already and others that are less so become evident because of the way they are presented.
Not just informative, not just enjoyable, this book fully exhibits one quality that heavily contributes to its importance: it is just. The reader will feel the moral imperative that sits at the heart of the notion itself of urban design, from the case study part of the research and eventually blasting in the discussion of the informal settlement case in Mumbai. Yes, āslumsā are too densely inhabited, they are poorly serviced and even more poorly maintained. However, they are āa territory of habitation, enterprise and politics [which] opens up new theorizations of Southern cities that do not fit the global cities paradigm as command and control centers, yet are significant in their own rightā.
It is in the distance between the āinformal settlementsā and the āSmart Cityā glasses through which the reality of urbanization in India can be looked at that the latter reveals its deep historical nature: one that sits comfortably in the āurban turnā that caught India as well as many other countries of the Global South in the last three decades or so, one that politically and ideologically qualifies as a direct manifestation of economic liberalization, privatization, and globalization. It is when you look at the informal settlement phenomenon in India that you recognize that the king is naked, and the need to learn from informal settlements is integral with that of seriously addressing their often dramatic hygienic and infrastructural conditions. And they are in fact integral to understanding what are, authentically, the booming formal cities for the expanding middle-upper class of India and what is, authentically, the climate change challenge that we urban designers must address globally. Now.
Not only a useful, urgent, documented, passionate, well-structured, and intellectually stimulating reading. But an undisputedly just one. One that sets a way forward for us all.
Dr. Sergio Porta 17 April 2019
Professor of Urban Design
Department of Architecture
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, United Kingdom
