November 14, 2022 | Reflections
Globally, the narrative of smart cities has been at the core of debates around urbanization and development for more than a decade. However, there is a significant lack of clarity regarding what a ‘smart city’ actually is. Yet, countries worldwide aspire for ‘smart’ cities. The Indian central government also embraced this rhetoric in 2015 when it launched the Smart Cities Mission, which aims to create 100 smart cities in India by 2023.
In this blog post, I try to take a closer look at how India’s Smart Cities Mission views technology and technological solutions by exploring the claims made in its Mission guidelines document. Although this blog focuses specifically on India, I hope it alerts readers to the pitfalls of smart city narratives that uncritically rely on technological solutions. I emphasize the need to ensure citizen participation and democratic decision-making while designing and deploying technological interventions in cities.
The geographer Ayona Datta, in her work on the utopic visions of smart cities in India, contends that in the smart city narrative, two problematic visions of neoliberalism regarding technology come together. One, technology invariably drives economic growth, and two, the use of technology in governance will necessarily improve efficiency, transparency, and inclusion. The political economy of smart cities and its tendencies to benefit the broader capitalist framework have also been noted by scholars. In his paper about the political economy of smart cities, Jathan Sadowski argues that the uncritical embrace of technological urbanism will lead to a corporate takeover of urban spaces. Such evidence should make us pause and reflect on the socio-political and economic implications of smart cities.
In what follows, I discuss three aspects related to the politics of technology in smart cities that may help us better understand how governments think about and deploy technological interventions for urban problems.
The cover page of India’s Smart Cities Mission Statement and Guidelines. [complete document is available here]
In the rhetoric of smart cities, problems of the city are often reduced to problems that can be solved by technology. For instance, India’s Smart Cities Mission guidelines document states that incorporating technology into area development strategies will “transform existing areas, including slums, into better-planned ones, thereby improving the livability of the whole city”. There is no explanation in the guidelines on how this will happen. Many pressing problems in Indian cities, like the non-provision of welfare in urban slums, require active civic participation and careful political manoeuvring. However, the narrative of the smart city shifts the focus away from the political to the technological. The result is a shallow understanding of complex urban issues for which the application of technology is projected as the solution.
Take the case of safety in Pune city in Maharashtra, India. Under the Smart Cities Mission, Pune rolled out a mobile app to help people avoid unsafe areas/streets. The app will determine the safety index for streets based on multiple quantitative factors – crime data, feeds from surveillance cameras, number of people on the street – and what the website calls the “crowdsourced feeling data”. The data for the app comes from the Indian Urban Data Exchange (IUDX) platform that enables sharing of data across agencies and departments. However, it is easy to see why quantifying the problem of safety to an abstract summation of unrelated components can be problematic. High crime rates may indicate many things, like effective crime reporting and over-policing. These quantitative factors alone cannot be taken as blanket indicators of the safety status in a neighbourhood, rather, they indicate a lack of a nuanced understanding.
Such a lack of nuanced understanding of problems will only lead to a reinforcement of the status quo, if not deterioration of living conditions. Moreover, many have argued that the kind of technological reductionism we see in the smart cities narrative only serves the profit-seeking purpose of technology providers, who are often private entities.
Technological Solutionism: How Solutions Are Seen
In the smart cities narrative, technology is sold as an unfailing cure for all urban problems. The city is understood as a quantifiable entity that can be seen as a set of technical systems. Evgeny Morozov calls this recasting of complex social problems as technical problems with definite, computable solutions as technological solutionism.
India’s Smart Cities Mission guidelines claim that comprehensive development in a technology-led way will improve quality of life, create employment and enhance incomes for all, especially the poor and the disadvantaged. It also promises an improvement in the quality of life in cities by tapping into a “range of approaches – digital and information technologies, urban planning best practices, public-private partnerships, and policy change”. However, how exactly will a technology-led agenda help achieve these goals is unclear. The Mission, therefore, conveniently discards the prospects of alternate, democratic, and participatory solutions in favour of fetishization and excessive application of technology.
Technological Determinism: How Technology is Seen
The third major feature of technology in smart urbanism is technological determinism. Technological determinism is the mode of thinking that claims that technology (and very often, only technology) has the power to cause, determine, or restructure the social world.
Emphasis on creating technological solutions for diverse urban issues is also clearly visible in India’s Smart Cities vision. The guidelines document is remarkably vague in its usage of the word technology. It mentions that “using smart technologies for the development of the poor and marginalized will be an important part” of the Mission. However, there is ambiguity as to what these technologies are and how they will be deployed.
In the case of Pune’s mobile app, we can see both solutionism and determinism at play. If the city wants to improve the safety of neighbourhoods, a mobile application alone that classifies them based on perceived safety can never be a solution. Moreover, crowdsourcing of feelings implies a real possibility of biases and prejudices against poorer neighbourhoods getting factored into the perception of safety, thereby making the city more exclusionary rather than inclusive. Avenues for positive change and community engagement are, therefore, closed off.
Therefore, technological determinism is concerning because it leads to the overreliance on and overconfidence in the power of technology-led, technocratic decision-making that is often opaque to citizens, thereby precluding the possibility of participatory decision-making.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that technology and technological solutions have the potential to produce positive change in cities. But how governments worldwide conceive of and promote technological solutions as a silver bullet to urban problems is dangerous. What is required is a closer examination of prospects, potential, and politics of technology in developmental narratives.
Most urban issues can only be solved through civic intervention and participatory planning. Without careful deliberation in planning and robust grievance redressal mechanisms in implementation, technology will only exacerbate most urban problems rather than solve them.
Venkata Subrahmanian NV is pursuing a Master’s in Public Policy at the Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies (ADCPS) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His research interests include urbanism and urban politics, smart cities, and the socio-political impacts of technology. Currently, he is investigating the relationship between public spaces, policing, technology, and prospects of mobilization in urban India.
Published: 11/14/2022