Fantasy visions, Informal Urbanization, and Local conflict: Contradictions of Smart City imaginaries in India

Abstract Smart city imaginaries have emerged in southern cities driven by neoliberal logics in the urban space. In the Indian context, much scholarly work in India has continued to engage with sweeping accounts of cities as opposed to detailed empirical studies. In this paper, I attempt to address this gap through an in-depth ethnographic inquiry of a slum redevelopment project(part of Smart city initiative) in the city of Bhubaneswar, India. I seek to understand ways in which smart city initiatives influence the everyday life of the marginalized urban slum dwellers. Drawing on participant observation; document analysis; and semi-structured interviews, I put forth three key findings from the study that advance the notion that Smart Cities initiatives in Indian cities actively marginalize the slum dwellers by attempting to dominate through inclusion. I borrow from Foucauldian concept of ‘counter-conducts’ and its reimagination in planning by Huxley (2017) to demonstrate that smart cities discourses are counter-intuitively resulting in emergent spaces of resistance in the form of counter-hegemonic practices, thus allowing spaces for evolution of discourse from unfamiliar territories. I conclude by discussing that city planning and governance pathways in India risk creating complicated path dependencies that can lead to state-citizen conflicts in the future.