Ayona Datta

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The (un)smart city Fictions of sentient urban
futures

• Ayona Datta
• School of Geography
• University of Leeds
• Twitter _at_ayonadatta
• Email a.datta_at_leeds.ac.uk

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The Sentient City

• A sentient city is one that is able to hear and
  feel things happening within it, yet doesnt
  necessarily know anything in particular about
  them. It feels you but doesnt necessarily know
  you. (Sheppard, p30-31).
• Smart city as a form of urbanism where the
  complexity of urban life can be measured and
  rendered predictable through algorithms.
• in an un-smart city, the government acts
  without information, often based on
  preconceptions. (Mukhopadhyay 2015)
• An (un)smart city is one that relies on
  technology to remove social symptoms in a deeply
  unequal society.

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Three Fictions
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1. Crisis of urbanization

• With an urban population of 31, India is at a
  point of transition where the pace of
  urbanization will speed up. It is for this reason
  that we need to plan our urban areas well and
  cannot wait any longer to do so. The relatively
  low base allows us to plan our urbanization
  strategy in the right direction by taking
  advantage of the latest developments in
  technology especially in ICT. (GoI 2015)

The construction of new cities based on a
rural-urban migration model relies on alarmist
predictions (Kundu 2011)
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2. Fictions of terra nullis

• Framework for making changes in land use need to
  be reviewed and procedures simplified.
• Laws for making land available for public
  purposes need to become more liberal
• (GoI 2015)
• Manipulation of territory becomes the business of
  the state.
• Materialisation of the smart city depends on the
  exceptionality of the terra nullis.

Notion of terra nullis is essential for the
conceptualisation of the smart city. Regimes of
dispossession Land for public purpose
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3. Fiction of horizontal citizenships

• Social pressure on other citizens can often
  remove resistance and facilitate a greater degree
  of civic discipline (GoI 2015)
• When we build these smart cities, we will be
  faced with a massive surge of people who will
  desire to enter these cities. We will be forced
  to keep them out. This is the natural way of
  things, for if we do not keep them out they will
  override our ability to maintain such
  infrastructure. There are only two way to keep
  people out of any space prices and policing.
  Dr Laveesh Bhandari, founder and Chief
  economist, Indicus Analytics Pvt Ltd.

• Citizenship as a benign problem space resolved by
  access to connectivity
• Shifts sites of citizenship contestations from
  the public sphere to the digital sphere.
• Production of new territorial delineations around
  the notion of inside/outside, centre/periphery

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Emergence of subaltern (counter)topographies
(Katz 2001)

• At stake here is not just the idea of what makes
  a city, rather who or what controls the idea and
  materialisation of citizenship.
• Developing contours of affiliation between the
  digital and the material
• Who are the digital citizens in a deeply unequal
  society?
• What transformation in civil and human rights are
  assumed when digital rights are universally
  applied?
• How is democracy and the nature of the public
  sphere altered when citizens becomes the source
  of data for city management?