THE (UN)SMART CITY:
FICTIONS OF SENTIENT URBAN
FUTURES
Ayona Datta
School of Geography
University of Leeds
Twitter: @ayonadatta
Email: a.datta@leeds.ac.uk
The Sentient City
• “A sentient city is one that is able to hear and feel things happening
within it, yet doesn’t necessarily know anything in particular about
them. It feels you but doesn’t necessarily know you.” (Sheppard,
p30-31).
• Smart city as a form of urbanism where the complexity of urban life
can be measured and rendered predictable through algorithms.
• “in an ‘un-smart city’, the government acts without
information, often based on preconceptions.”
(Mukhopadhyay 2015)
• An (un)smart city is one that relies on technology to remove
social symptoms in a deeply unequal society.
Three Fictions
1. ‘Crisis’ of urbanization
The construction of
new cities based on
a rural-urban
migration model
relies on ‘alarmist
predictions’ (Kundu
2011)
With an urban population of 31%,
India is at a point of transition
where the pace of urbanization
will speed up. It is for this reason
that we need to plan our urban
areas well and cannot wait any
longer to do so. The relatively
low base allows us to plan our
urbanization strategy in the right
direction by taking advantage of
the latest developments in
technology especially in ICT. (GoI
2015)
2. Fictions of ‘terra
nullis’
“Framework for making changes in land
use need to be reviewed and procedures
simplified.
Notion of terra nullis is
essential for the
conceptualisation of the
smart city.
Laws for making land available for public
purposes need to become more liberal”
(GoI 2015)
Regimes of
dispossession
Manipulation of territory becomes the
business of the state.
‘Land for public purpose’
Materialisation of the smart city depends
on the exceptionality of the terra nullis.
3. Fiction of
horizontal
citizenships
Citizenship as a benign
problem space resolved
by access to connectivity
Shifts sites of citizenship
contestations from the
public sphere to the
digital sphere.
Production of new
territorial delineations
around the notion of
inside/outside,
centre/periphery
“Social pressure on other citizens can
often remove resistance and facilitate a
greater degree of civic discipline” (GoI
2015)
“When we build these smart cities, we will
be faced with a massive surge of people
who will desire to enter these cities. We will
be forced to keep them out. This is the
natural way of things, for if we do not keep
them out they will override our ability to
maintain such infrastructure. There are only
two way to keep people out of any space –
prices and policing”. [Dr Laveesh Bhandari,
founder and Chief economist, Indicus
Analytics Pvt Ltd.]
Emergence of subaltern ‘(counter)topographies’
(Katz 2001)
• At stake here is not just the idea of what makes a city, rather who
or what controls the idea and materialisation of citizenship.
• Developing ‘contours’ of affiliation between the digital and the
material
• Who are the digital citizens in a deeply unequal society?
• What transformation in civil and human rights are assumed when
digital rights are universally applied?
• How is democracy and the nature of the public sphere altered when
citizens becomes the source of data for city management?