Digital India’s Smart Transform-Nation: Enabling or Discouraging a ‘Chatur Citizenry’?

Abstract

Instead of exploring ‘smart cities’ as future utopias, this paper concentrates on historically constructed, yet actively contested socio-spatial inequalities. Drawing upon Chandigarh’s master-planning experience, it explores epistemic, material, and civic dimensions of Chandigarh’s Smart City Proposal to ask whether vernacular reinterpretations of ‘smart citizenry’ help the subaltern reclaim their ‘right to the city’. Thus, following a critical genealogy that shifts attention from ‘smart cities’ towards ‘citizen centeredness’, this research focuses on the construction and contestation of ‘smart citizenship’. Overall, technocratic and city-branding discourses, which legitimate restricting funds to a ‘smart enclave’ at the cost of evictions and banning ‘encroachers’, are confronted by housing rights activists. This motivates scholars to theorize a subversive identity, in which ‘smartness’ gains new meaning. However, epistemic contestations are not enough to create recognition for the needs and rights of the working poor, who work for but cannot reside in Chandigarh. Further alliances and political will are required.