Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. In India in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of Dholera, the first Indian smart city, I examine how global models of smart cities are provincialized in the regional state of Gujarat through local histories, politics and laws. I argue first, that Dholera smart city is part of a longer genealogy of utopian urban planning that emerged as a response to the challenges of development and modernity in post-independent India. Second, that Dholera highlights a shift towards an ‘entrepreneurial urbanization’ in a regional state interested in scaling up a ‘Gujarat model of development’ for emulation at the scale of the nation. Finally, that in Dholera ‘speed’ is a relative term across its scales of manifestation from the global to local, where short ‘bursts of speed’ in conceptualisation and investment is matched by significant ‘bottlenecks’ via local protests. The paper concludes that Dholera’s faultlines are built into its utopian imaginings, which prioritises urbanization as a business model rather than a model of social justice.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)