#2 - Smart (City) Contexts

In 2015 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a national “Smart Cities Mission”, an urban renewal program with the goal to develop smart cities across the sub-continent, making them citizen friendly and sustainable. The mission initially included 100 cities, with the deadline for completion of the projects set between 2019 and 2023. As of August 2022, which is when I’m recording this episode, the effective combined completion of all the commissioned projects stands at 11% which has put a lot of pressure on the national government to accelerate the completion of the remaining cities. The whole project has been shrouded in a mixture of unprecedented transparency and controversy as it set out an ambitious task to put India on the top of sustainable urban development.

This is not the first time that a smart city project creates such ambiguity. Today, smart cities are still making headlines with projects such as India’s Smart Cities Mission and Saudi Arabia’s Neom Project getting a lot of media attention. However, historically speaking the concept of the smart city has always been criticized for being somewhat naive as its implementation of technology comes off more as a marketing scheme to attract foreign investment rather than a means to improve quality of life. And I mean if you think about it, the name itself implies that typical cities are inherently “not smart” which I’m sure we can all agree is debatable. If we’ve learned anything throughout the years is that the idea of “smartness” changes based on the surrounding context. So, with this in mind, it’s time to get down to basics.

For this episode, I have with me Parshav Seth and Gayatri Agrawal, two urban technologists who have tried to deconstruct the concept of smartness. Together we will try to understand how smartness is understood around the world and to prove that a lot of the time it has little to do with sensors and flying cars and a lot to do with the citizens who are meant to use them.