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Cited by 258Smart Cities and TechnologiesUrban Planning and GovernanceUrban Development and Societal Issues

The digital turn in postcolonial urbanism: Smart citizenship in the making of India's 100 smart cities

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Datta, Ayona·2018·Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
DOI 10.1111/tran.12225
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Abstract

The smart city as a “digital turn” in critical urban geography has gone largely unnoticed in postcolonial urbanism. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence of new forms of postcolonial citizenship at the intersection of digital and urban publics. In particular, I investigate the production of a “smart citizen” in India's 100 smart cities challenge – a state‐run inter‐urban competition that seeks to transform 100 existing cities through ICT‐driven urbanism. By examining the publicly available documents and online citizen consultations as well as observations of stakeholder workshops in four of the proposed smart cities, I illustrate how a global technocratic imaginary of “smart citizenship” exists alongside its vernacular translation of a “chatur citizen” – a politically engaged citizen rooted in multiple publics and spatialities. This takes place through three key processes – enumerations, performances and breaches. Enumerations are coercions by the state of an urban population that has so far been largely hidden from analogue technologies of governance and governmentality. Articulations are the performances of smart citizenship across digital and material domains that ironically extend historic social inequalities from the urban to the digital realm. Finally, breaches are the ruptures of the impenetrable technocratic walls around the global smart city, which provides a window into alternative and possible futures of postcolonial citizenship in India. Through these three processes, I argue that subaltern citizenship in the postcolony exists not in opposition, but across urban and digital citizenships. I conclude by offering the potential of a future postcolonial citizen who opens up entangled performances of compliance and connivance, authority and insecurity, visibility and indiscernibility across political, social, urban and digital publics.

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  1. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  2. Hill, D. (2012). Dark matter and trojan horses: A strategic design vocabulary. Moscow, Russia: Strelka Press.
  3. Jazeel, T. (2014). Subaltern geographies: Geographical knowledge and postcolonial strategy, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 35, 88- 103.
  4. Lerman, J. (2013). Big data and it exclusions. Stanford Law Review, 66, 55-63.

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Authors
Datta, A.
Affiliations
King's College London (GB)
Corresponding author
Datta, Ayona
ORCID
Datta, Ayona
Venue
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2018-03-02
Volume
43
Issue
3
Pages
405-419
ISSN
  • 0020-2754 (ISSN-L)
  • 1475-5661
DOI
10.1111/tran.12225
OpenAlex
W2791005044
Cited by
258
References
55
Citations by year
2026: 37 · 2025: 38 · 2024: 38 · 2023: 39 · 2022: 33 · 2021: 28 · 2020: 23 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 5
FWCI
13.82
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
  • Research Portal (King's College London) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/N007395/1)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Media Technology › Smart Cities and Technologies
  • Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Urban Planning and Governance
  • Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Urban Development and Societal Issues
Keywords
smart cities, smart citizenship, postcolonial citizenship, digital turn, postcolonial urbanism, India, technocracy, governmentality, digital publics, urban publics, citizen participation, social inequality

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