Smart City in India

Urban Laboratory, Paradigm or Trajectory?

Binti Singh, Manoj Parmar

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000710984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book is a critical reflection on the Smart City Mission in India. Drawing on ethnographic data from across Indian cities, this volume assesses the transformative possibilities and limitations of the program. It examines the ten core infrastructural elements that make up a city, including water, electricity, waste, mobility, housing, environment, health, and education, and lays down the basic tenets of urban policy in India. The volume underlines the need to recognize liminal spaces and the plans to make the 'smart city' an inclusive one. The authors also look at maintaining a link between the older heritage of a city and the emerging urban space.

This volume will be of great interest to planners, urbanists, and policymakers, as well as scholars and researchers of urban studies and planning, architecture, and sociology and social anthropology.

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 authors’ 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, ‘slums’ are too densely inhabited, they are poorly serviced and even more poorly maintained. However, they are “a 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 right”.

It is in the distance between the ‘informal settlements’ and the ‘Smart City’ 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 ‘urban turn’ 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

FOREWORD 2

In this volume titled Smart City in India: Urban Laboratory, Paradigm or Trajectory? authors Dr. Binti Singh and Prof. Manoj Parmar have undertaken academic reflection on the very idea of the smart city that seems to be the guiding vision behind many cities, both globally and in India. The volume is based on primary research in the second-tier historic cities of Lucknow, Varanasi, and Jaipur currently implementing smart city projects and also a detailed study of Gazdhar Bandh slum in the megacity of Mumbai. In addition, the authors have compiled innumerable secondary data sources that include detailed information on various cities of India, their current status on smart city projects, and updated data up to the Ease of Living Index released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs in August 2018.

The authors have not opted for the usual heavy academic criticism, but rather undertake a timely review and reflect on the current urban transformation that India is undergoing and how the Smart City Mission has provided impetus through smart intervention. The authors have cautiously steered from a total dismissal of this intervention but have refreshingly taken a step back to reflect, raise important questions on India’s urban realities, and open new conversations on the urban trajectory that 100 smart cities in India have already embarked on and the choices that other cities could opt for.

The authors flag important concerns and challenges related to city governance, human and cultural dimensions, sustainability, informality, and urban design and planning in the current narrative. With several examples across cities of India and smart city projects and plans currently operational, they argue that there is time for course correction, factoring in India’s commitment to Goal 11 of the SDGs, quintessential components of Indian cities that may have been missed and crucial sociological and human concerns that could pave the way forward for the smart cities of tomorrow. Rather than despair, the authors choose hope for India’s urban future and see the Smart City Mission as an opportunity that has opened up new pathways that cities in India could work on, capitalizing on their own strengths to chart their own destiny.

I sincerely believe that this book will serve as a rich resource for urban researchers, officials, professionals, and urban managers.

Dr. Ramnath Sonawane, Chief Executive Officer,
Nagpur Smart and Sustainable City Development Corporation Ltd.,
Nagpur, India

ABBREVIATIONS

ABD	Area-Based Development
AI	Artificial Intelligence
AMRUT	Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation
ANPR	Automatic Number Plate Recognition
ANVP	Atal Nagar Vikas Pradhikaran
APEDA	Agricultural and Processes Food Products Export Development Authority
ASI	Archaeological Survey of India
BHU	Banaras Hindu University
BOT	Built–Operate–Transfer
BRTS	Bus Rapid Transit System
CBO	Community-Based Organization
CCTV	Closed-Circuit Television
CEO	Chief Executive Officer
CSR	Corporate Social Responsibility
DPRs	Detail Project Reports
ELU	Existing Land Use
FY	Financial Year
GDP	Gross Domestic P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Foreword 1
• Foreword 2
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Smart City Mission in India
• 3 Packing history and culture with smartness: the cases of Lucknow and Varanasi
• 4 Urbanism, urban design, and planned historic cities
• 5 Reimagining the planning paradigm in India
• 6 Conclusion
• Index