When Jawaharlal Nehru had to choose an architect to design the new capital for divided Punjab in the newly independent nation, he was building an ideology as a city. And this ideology was supposed to self-consciously deny tradition. Tradition, he felt, would bring with it the memory of a nation divided along lines of caste, language, race and gender. Instead the rationalism of science, it was thought, would be able to create a city for the future — a city unfettered by the weight of tradition. He chose Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect, in the hope that the new city would be built on modern rationalist principles. Science was to trump history. Chandigarh was planned using these principles — a neat grid patterns with sectors for governance, commerce, various housing types. The city today — that epitome of modernist planning in India — is a great place to stay for car-owners who live in the single-family homes around the parks in the various sectors; the poor often have no place and have to live in slums on the outskirts.
If there is a common feature in the profession of the architect/planner and that of the politician it is the promise of a better future. Both dangle utopian chimeras in front of us that they promise to deliver if we choose their services. These include a better world to live in — better living conditions, better employment opportunities, better environmental conditions, more transparency and accountability in governance among many more imaginations of a better life. These become a constellation of ideas that represent the aspirations and dreams of all. The current government was able to package this together under a convenient and catchy slogan: Acche Din (Better Days). These better days were mainly defined by their difference from the previous years, which were projected to be filled with corruption, nepotism and all kinds of darkness. The campaign’s success was clear in the result of last year’s elections. The ‘Smart Cities’ project was one vehicle to deliver on the government’s pre-election promises of ‘development’.
What are we to make of the ‘Smart’ in ‘Smart Cities’ — the new catchphrase that the government has introduced to our vocabulary. Not that this phrase is new in urban planning parlance. It is yet another in the never-ending litany of ‘latest’, ‘newest’, ‘cutting-edge’ and ‘avant-garde’ terms used by architects, planners and, above all, Information Technology giants as the panacea to all the evils of our cities. Although there is great deal of ambiguity about what the term ‘smart city’ means in our context; around the world, the formula that is being used to create the ‘Smart Cities’ is that an information technology company provides a highly technologically advanced infrastructure system that is involved in collecting and analysing the data of different types from within the city. These involve the number of people, the number of cars, the amount of water needed, the electricity…. The other aspect is that these cities are to be built largely by the private sector. In a sense, this model of development seems to be very close to the model of the Special Economic Zones that were being touted as the vehicles through which rural India was going to be transformed.
Fuelled by airbrushed images of high-rise towers glistening in the sunlight, parks where middle-class children and expatriates jog in the mornings, and metro lines zooming overhead, these images have become representative of a sort of city-ness where all the existing complex social inequities and economic travails are magically whisked away. Perhaps it was no accident that the first imagination of the ‘smart cities’ were self-contained enclaves that would rise like mirages in the hinterland around existing cities. These gave rise to the thought that some sort of shelter could be found in the security of the known. The idea was that the danger of the unknown would be kept away and managed by this mega-machine that would keep the environment ‘safe’.
Speaking about smart cities, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas said that the traditional trinity of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ have been replaced in the 21st century by ‘comfort, security and sustainability’. Thus the older, traditional cities — where one met strangers — were painted as a lost cause. It was here that danger, corruption, fear, crime and all kinds of darkness lurk. The ‘Smart City’, it seemed, lay in a space of infinite light. As a propaganda piece, it was perfect.
This techno-utopian imagination is not new to urban planning and architecture. To consolidate their claim over being the professionals most capable of managing the rapidly growing urban landscape, planners and architects — especially over the last century — have often made a case for the mathematical and rationalistic justification of their plans. Multitudes of data have been collected and processed though varied analytical systems to arrive at probabilities and projections of the future of cities. Cities and neighbourhoods have been built in the misplaced faith that, if we understand the math, it will be automatically an ideal place for living. The cities that emerged because of this were banal, joyless and often completely inaccessible for most of the Indian urban population.
The fundamental belief that shaped this outlook was that people’s lives, desires and aspirations can be understood through a mathematical model. The failure of this idea of planning dots the contemporary world. Perhaps the most notorious example known to architects is the demolition of the Pruitt Igoe housing projects in St Louis, Missouri. A high-rise complex of slab-like buildings set in a landscape to house the urban poor was demolished a few years after they were built, as they were perceived to be centres of crime and corruption. This contrast between the supposed order that lies within a techno-utopia and the impossibility of pinning down real life and desires has been a common theme in literature and films over the past century; whether it is George Orwell’s 1984 with the all-seeing and all-knowing Big Brother or Jacques Tati’s French classic Playtime where the bumbling Monsieur Hulot encounters an alienating and cold modernist Paris where everything is in it’s right place; or Peter Weir’s The Truman Show whose world of perfection lies within a protected bubble that the hero has to break out of to experience reality.
The question is whether the new ‘smart cities’ programme is different from this. Here too technology is ratcheted up as a tool to create a better city. What is this better city? Does it provide decent housing for the inhabitants? Is it a place for freedom and equality? So far, besides the uses of InfoTech and some anodyne lip-service to other catchphrases like ‘green buildings’ and ‘sustainability’, we have little to judge. Nothing we have seen so far even attempts to address contextual issues concerning the environment, housing and employment. In fact, we have no idea how these smart cities are to relate to the existing towns or villages around them. It seems that, with the private sector involved in construction and probably maintenance, they will end up becoming private enclaves for the rich and middle classes while the poor will probably have to fend for themselves on the outskirts. These are the people and spaces that are often difficult to map. They slip through hard categories and survive by negotiating the spaces in between the formal. Without this possibility, they might not have a way to survive. The smart city idea not only has no way to understand this way of life but also is fact antithetical to it with its focus on clarity and measurability.
This is not to say that there is no space to integrate new technology with city design or to use technology to create an environment that allows a better living environment. There are infinite examples where information technology can and has made institutions more transparent and accountable. Is the “smart city” umbrella that possibility? It is doubtful in its current avatar. If the ‘Smart Cities’ programme has to genuinely affect the lives of people, it has to stop having a blind faith in technology’s ability to save us. It has to engage with the forces that are currently actively shaping our cities at all scales, in many different ways. It has to, perhaps, move away from the large rhetorical flourishes into more grounded interventions that enable local communities to practically and positively use information technology in shaping their environments — where they have control over the technology and not where the technology becomes the all-seeing, all-knowing Big Brother watching every move they make.
Rohan Shivkumar is a Mumbai-based architect and urban designer and the Deputy Director of the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies.
