Hi-tech prototype cities are raising concerns that India’s new urban enclaves will override local laws and use surveillance to keep out the poor
In a monograph for a conference on smart cities in Mumbai in January, the economist and consultant Laveesh Bhandari described smart cities as “special enclaves” that would use prohibitive prices and harsh policing to prevent “millions of poor Indians” from “enjoying the privileges of such great infrastructure”. “This is the natural way of things,” he noted, “for if we do not keep them out, they will override our ability to maintain such infrastructure.”
Bhandari’s bald statements sparked social-media pandemonium, and the economist is now at pains to assert he is far from uncritical of such plans. “I am describing the unfeasibility and undesirability of a thoughtless smart-city vision,” he says. “When you invest so much without thinking about services and low-cost housing and governance, then you will end up creating enclaves that keep out the poor.”
In their present form, Bhandari adds, smart cities are essentially rechristened Special Economic Zones (SEZs); neo-liberal business-friendly zones exempt from taxes, duties and stringent labour laws. They are also subject to what urban scholars say is a form of “privatised governance”, due to a constitutional amendment that renders local governments powerless. All of which, according to Bhandari, makes them inherently and unreservedly exclusionary. “The current template for smart cities only mandates infrastructure creation. What we need is democracy and rule of law, not governance by fiat that holds in SEZs and smart cities created in China.”
“The smart city paradigm comes from mid-scale European cities, and they’re meant to make existing infrastructure work in a more integrated way, whether it’s waste, habitation or transport connectivity,” says Gautam Bhan, a researcher with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Delhi. “But Indian cities struggle with the absence of networks. Just 16% of Indian cities have underground sewage drainage systems. No technology can make the system work better if basic services don’t exist.”
Set against this context, Gift City, which models itself after financial hubs Canary Wharf in London and Paris’s La Defense, starts to resemble the Emerald City, a glittering spectacle at the end of a shiny highway. In India such cities – geared towards high-end services – seem unlikely to provide many meaningful livelihood opportunities in the rural hinterlands where they come up.
“Having islands of well-serviced smart cities amidst a vast sea of poorly-serviced and impoverished villages leads to what urban scholars have called the juxtaposition of the citadel and ghetto,” says Sai Balakrishnan, an urban scholar at Rutgers, who studies land conflicts and urbanisation in India...