UC Davis

This dissertation examines the emergence of smart cities in India and South Asia at the intersection of flows of capital and expertise. These urban spaces lie at the congruence of transnational networks of capital and discourse of smartness amidst an ongoing politico-economic transformation in India with the economic reforms of the 1990s, where the city has become a vehicle of economic development. It engages with emerging debates in urban anthropology, critique of smart cities, practices of place-making, and media and computational studies to examine the spatial forms of smartness, urban design, practices of self-help and the technocratic apparatus put in place during the pandemic that realized spaces of smartness.

The government of India introduced the Smart Cities Mission as a flagship program in India in 2015 selecting more than hundred cities to be smartened making cities compete for prestige and funds. Focusing on Pune, Maharashtra, Western part of India, my research explores how relations of power and capital were dissimulated with the instituting of networks for making smart cities; and smartness entailed making patterns of labor, movement and leisure calculable in the service of capital and profit undermining diversity. The dissertation conceptualizes “in-between spaces” using spatiality as a method to critique smart cities bringing together practices of design, relationality of civil society networks, digital technologies and embodiment to understand what kind of socio-cultural milieu a smart city comprises, and answers whether a smart city can be considered specific to the city where it evolves.