ACCESS Seminar: Smart City Development in India

Abstract

The burgeoning of smart cities worldwide has raised the urgency of critical smart urbanism research – especially in contested geographies of the Global South. This talk focuses on understanding smart city development in India (home to one-fourth of the Global South population), with an ambitious plan to develop 100 smart cities through the Smart Cities Mission (SCM), Government of India. It offers extensive empirical analysis in Bhubaneswar, Pune and Chennai – three of the first 20 smart cities prioritised for implementation in the SCM, by analysing the Mission’s governance structure, examining urban planning challenges in the context of fragmented urbanism, and illustrating examples of place-based outcomes on the ground. The results highlight how informality – the dominant mode of urbanism in the South – challenges smart city development in India.

Biography

Deepti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Urbanism at the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. Her ongoing research spans smart urbanism and southern urbanism, with a particular interest in urban informality in the Global South, specifically in India. She has collaborated with colleagues across urban studies, human geography, digital media and technologies, practitioners, policymakers, and non-government organisations. She has built her international networks through research in India, South Africa, the UK, and Australia.