Ayona DattaSchool of Geography

University of Leeds

Twitter: @ayonadatta

Email: a.datta@leeds.ac.uk

THE ‘SMART ENTREPRENEURIAL' CITY: VISIONS OF MIGRATION AND URBANIZATION IN INDIA

1. Urbanization as a business model Smart Cities are those that

are able to attract investments. Good quality infrastructure, simple and transparent online processes that make it easy to establish an enterprise and run it efficiently are important features of an investor friendly city. (GoI 2015).

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. (GoI 2015)

2. Manufacture 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 creation of terra nullis.

Notion of terra nullis is essential for the conceptualisation of the smart city.

Regimes of dispossession

‘Land for public purpose’

3. Illusion 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

Will smart cities improve the lives of those on the social, political, environmental and legal margins of cities and citizenship?

ORDo their success rely precisely on the elimination of those on the margins?