[Urbanstudy] Is India's 100 smart cities project a recipe for social apartheid?

[T M Vinod Kumar]

I totally disagree with Bhuvsnreswari and Henrick. What is written there
has no data base to prove. It is just like ones opinion with no basis. . It
is great disservice to science

T.M.Vinod Kumar.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 6:32 PM, Bhuvaneswari Raman <
raman.bhuvaneswari at gmail.com> wrote:

> Agreed with Henrik- it is a well researched and timely article.
> A positivist, quantitative sample survey does not reveal the reality on
> the ground. Pushed under the rhetoric of "scientificity" of social science
> research, positivist research serve as a comfortable vehicle to reinforce
> the Indian fiction of "Smart Cities" denying the invisible violence of
> constituting such cities in the name of growth and wealth for a few at the
> expense of a majority.
> Bhuvana
>
>
> On 11 June 2015 at 13:03, Henrik Valeur <hv at uid.dk> wrote:
>
>> Seems like a well-researched article covering many angles of the topic -
>> important and informative.
>> Henrik Valeur
>>
>>
>> On Jun 11, 2015, at 5:25 AM, T M Vinod Kumar wrote:
>>
>> Such write up sounds unscientific for me. A social scientist takes a
>> systematic sample, make hypothesis  and conduct surveys and tabulate it
>> before making conclusions drawn on smart cities. Of course India do not
>> have many smart cities but Jaipur, Hyderabad and Bangalore have potential
>> for smart cities. The author shall conduct sample surveys there and make
>> responsible conclusions.
>>
>> The write up looks like fiction.for me and degrade social scientists.
>>
>>
>> T.M.Vinod Kumar
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 12:12 PM, Vinay Baindur <yanivbin at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/07/india-100-smart-cities-project-social-apartheid?CMP=share_btn_tw
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *Is India's 100 smart cities project a recipe for social apartheid?*
>>> The emergence of hi-tech prototype cities is raising concerns that
>>> India’s new urban enclaves will override local laws and use surveillance to
>>> keep out the poor
>>>
>>>  A labourer pulls a cable in front of office buildings in Gujarat
>>> International Finance Tec-City (Gift City). Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Shruti Ravindran
>>>
>>> Thursday 7 May 2015 07.00 BSTLast modified on Friday 8 May 201513.09 BST
>>>
>>>
>>> In architectural renderings, Gujarat International Financial Tec-City
>>> resembles a thicket of glassy blue skyscrapers soaring above the Sabarmati
>>> River in Gandhinagar, capital of the western Indian state of Gujarat. Its
>>> “signature towers” include the Diamond, a 410-metre spire resembling an icy
>>> stalagmite, and the 362m Gateway Towers, a bendy, sinuous version of Rem
>>> Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing.
>>>
>>> By 2021, the creators of Gift City, as it is commonly known, promise to
>>> surround these towers with world-class infrastructure which will provide
>>> residents with round-the-clock power and water, a “district-cooling system”
>>> that sluices chilled water through buildings, and an automatic garbage
>>> disposal system sending excrement hurtling through sewage pipes at 90kph –
>>> “faster than most Indian trains”, as the journalist Manu Joseph dryly
>>> observed.
>>>
>>> The beating heart – or rather, robot brain – of Gift City is its
>>> “Command and Control Centre”, which keeps traffic moving smoothly and
>>> monitors every building through a network of CCTVs. In a country where more
>>> than 300 million people live without electricity, and twice as many don’t
>>> have access to toilets, Gift City’s towers sound like hypertrophic castles
>>> in the sky. But they are an essential part of the Indian government’s urban
>>> vision, one that it wants to see replicated a hundred times across the
>>> country. Recently, the Indian cabinetgreen-lit a £10 billion scheme that
>>> will be divided equally between building 100 smart cities, and rejuvenating
>>> another 500 cities and towns over the next five years.
>>>
>>> In a country where 300 million people live without electricity, Gift
>>> City’s towers sound like castles in the sky
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Yet many experts and planners fear that such “insta-cities”, if they are
>>> made, will prove dystopic and inequitable. Some even hint that smart cities
>>> may turn into social apartheid cities, governed by powerful corporate
>>> entities that could override local laws and governments 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.”
>>>
>>> Last July, Narendra Modi’s newly elected government allocated 70.6
>>> billion rupees (£762m) to its “100 Smart Cities” plan. This year’s
>>> allocation shrank to 1.4bn rupees, yet smart cities remain a key
>>> justification for a controversial land-acquisition ordinance the government
>>> is aiming to enact, which does away with mandatory consent and social
>>> safeguards for those whose lands are forcibly acquired. Over the past few
>>> months, smart city-themed conferences have been taking place every week in
>>> Delhi and Mumbai, culminating in the urban development minister Venkaiah
>>> Naidu’s announcement that the scheme would be “rolled out” imminently.
>>>
>>> Yet no one is quite sure of what these cities might look like, or who
>>> they’re for. Naidu, with not a little wistfulness, said that smart cities
>>> “would have clean water, assured power supply, efficient public transport
>>> and would not be polluted or congested”. A concept note from his ministry,
>>> last revised in December, explains that they will “have smart (intelligent)
>>> physical, social, institutional and economic infrastructure”, guaranteeing
>>> their residents employment opportunities and “a very high quality of life,
>>> comparable with any developed European city”.
>>>
>>> This repeated emphasis on high-end infrastructure and superlative
>>> quality of life hints at a discomfiting answer to the second question: who
>>> the intended inhabitants of smart cities are likely to be.
>>>
>>>  A visualisation of Palava City’s lakefront, designed to be the heart of
>>> this new city’s cultural and social life.
>>>
>>> The current template might have given us Palava City. This
>>> self-described smart city across 3,000 acres of Mumbai’s northeastern
>>> exurbs is being built by a city-based developer best known for treating
>>> skyscraper-erecting as a competitive sport. As its promotional video
>>> announces in a smug baritone, Palava City was inspired by the futuristic
>>> vision that brought Singapore, Dubai “and even Mumbai” into being.
>>>
>>> What this translates into is “essential public infrastructure” such as
>>> 24x7 electricity, immaculate wide roads, public transport, malls,
>>> multiplexes and luxury housing, including “Mumbai’s first and only
>>> golf-course-equipped residential township”. To make sure that no one
>>> trespasses on its immaculate privatopia, Palava plans to issue its
>>> residents with “smart identity cards”, and will watch over them through a
>>> system of “smart surveillance”.
>>>
>>> The emphasis on surveillance underlines the stratified, elitist nature
>>> of smart cities, according to the academic and author Pramod Nayar. “Smart
>>> cities will be heavily policed spaces,” he says, “where only eligible
>>> people – economically productive consumers (shoppers) and producers
>>> (employees) – will be allowed freedom of walking and travel, while ambient
>>> and ubiquitous surveillance will be tracked so as to anticipate the
>>> ‘anti-socials’.”
>>>
>>> As such, Nayar adds, smart cities will be “more fortresses than places
>>> of heterogeneous humanity, because they are meant only for specific classes
>>> of people”. One class to be served, the other to be surveilled and
>>> contained.
>>>
>>> Palava plans to issue its residents with smart identity cards, and watch
>>> over them via a system of smart surveillance
>>>
>>>  Palava City will feature ‘Mumbai’s first and only golf-course-equipped
>>> residential township’
>>>
>>> “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. “If the government does succeed in building these premium 100 smart
>>> cities, but does nothing to alleviate poverty and poor services in the
>>> surrounding areas, it could well lead to a politically volatile situation.
>>> These visible forms of spatial inequalities engender social mistrust and
>>> even violence.”
>>>
>>> Nowhere is this combination of political volatility and spatial
>>> inequality more striking than in the giant expressway projects snaking
>>> across the country’s hinterland since 2006. These six-to-eight lane
>>> highways, intended to thread together luxury townships and special economic
>>> zones, often come up on fertile farmland that is forcibly acquired under
>>> the pretext of fulfilling a “public purpose”. In May 2011, one such project
>>> just outside Delhi – involving an expressway, private sports-themed city,
>>> and the country’s first Formula 1 racetrack – led to months-long protests
>>> among farmers from 10 villages. The rally descended into violence when
>>> villagers clashed with armed police, leading to the deaths of two farmers
>>> and two policemen.
>>>
>>> The truth about smart cities: ‘In the end, they will destroy democracy'
>>>
>>>
>>> Not all manifestations of disquiet end in gunshots and death, however.
>>> Balakrishnan recounts an incident that took place on the outskirts of
>>> Bangalore, where villages are rapidly being replaced with IT parks, gated
>>> communities and wealthy villas. A friend returned to her “visibly opulent”
>>> bungalow one evening to find a young man lounging on her porch, drinking a
>>> cold beer from her fridge. When she took out her phone to call the police,
>>> he brandished a small knife and motioned for her to sit down. She did, upon
>>> which he finished his beer, thanked her politely and left.
>>>
>>> “This incident makes palpable the sense of resentment and alienation
>>> among those excluded from partaking in India’s new urban wealth,”
>>> Balakrishnan says. “The young man wasn’t out to harm anyone, but he felt
>>> justified, entitled almost, to break into an affluent home and to help
>>> himself to a few hours of luxury.”
>>>
>>> Every new smart city, she suggests, signals yet another “temporary
>>> secession, each of them setting in place a new social order that will not
>>> be easy to reverse, and that takes urban planning dangerously away from the
>>> public domain”. A hundred smart cities could spawn a thousand shadow
>>> cities, simmering with resentment and rage.
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> =============================
>> Prof.T.M.Vinod Kumar
>> Besant Nivas, Jayanthi Road, P.O.Kolathara
>> Kozhikode-673655,Kerala,India
>> Phone:0495-2422244
>> Mobile:9946550900
>> Email:tmvinod at gmail.com <mail%3Atmvinod at gmail.com>
>> skype id:tmvinodkumar
>> =============================
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>


-- 
=============================
Prof.T.M.Vinod Kumar
Besant Nivas, Jayanthi Road, P.O.Kolathara
Kozhikode-673655,Kerala,India
Phone:0495-2422244
Mobile:9946550900
Email:tmvinod at gmail.com <mail%3Atmvinod at gmail.com>
skype id:tmvinodkumar
=============================
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