While China is often the country looked to for rapidly evolving new modes of urbanisation, it’s in India where less spectacular but more innovative forms of smart city urbanisation, networking out to rural village communities, can be found. Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove from the Institute of Urbanology, based in Mumbai and Goa, report on a smart city model paradigm, which, they say, because it is not masterplanned and lacks the bells and whistles of the Chinese model, is not yet truly recongnised or understood. The accompanying images focus on one such example: the region of Konkan, outside Mumbai, activated by rail.

One of the most visible differences between India and China’s economic growth – for which India appears to have lost a lot of ground already – is in the realm of urbanisation. China has sprouted gigantic metropolises in less than a generation. In some cases even entire cycles of urban growth and post-industrial decay have occurred, with subsequent processes of memorialising via art biennales and regeneration via new investment or redevelopment. All this while India chugs along with cities that still draw on exhausted colonial energy and struggle with substandard facilities, basic infrastructure and quality of life.

In a desperate attempt to catch up with China, the Indian government is projecting a programme to build 100 or so “smart cities” with the help of global capital and American consultants. This is just the latest over-reaction to the misleading assertion that India is still 70 percent rural.  

Anyone looking at the history of development strategies in India may notice a pendular shift from a (Gandhian-Nehruvian) prioritisation of rural districts as primary sites of investment, to a blind faith in urbanisation as the most virtuous of all causes. For the past twenty or thirty years, the government has been trying hard to turn obsolete colonial cities such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi and Calcutta into roaring “engines of growth”, complete with new airports, flyovers, monorails, sealinks, skywalks and so on.

However, even at times when the rural/urban policy spectrum gets drastically tilted to one side or the other, something has always stopped successive governments from falling into a totalising approach in either direction, as far as development strategies on the ground are concerned.