A 100 smart cities, a 100 utopias

Abstract

In my response to the commentaries on my anchor article, I have taken on board the key question of how and why India has become the site of production of 100 proposed smart cities. I forward a notion of ‘technocratic nationalism’ to suggest that it is the young urban population in India who have largely bought into the smart city dream. Whilst drawing encouragement from the largely positive commentaries on my article, I then take on three main critiques of the article – first, that it has inadvertently promoted a hegemony of ‘city-ness’ by focusing on the imagined smart city to be; second, that the smart city has strong connections with colonial urban planning and third, whether Dholera should be considered the first smart city at all. I suggest that the article’s city-ness and postcolonial links to India’s urban planning is both political and heuristic, since it is the postcolonial ‘urban’ moment where India has situated its moment of modernity globalization and economic power. I contend that the final critique is based on a misinterpretation of the use of the word ‘first’, which was always intended to reflect a politics of innovation among cities. Finally, I suggest that the other ‘gaps’ in my article highlighted by one of the commentators is not a gap, rather beyond the scope and objectives of an exploratory article such as this.