INTERROGATING SMART IMAGINARIES IN INDIA
Location: India
Duration: 3 Months
Advisor: Rahul Mehrotra
Spring 2019 / Harvard Graduate School of Design
Project Team: Individual Thesis Work
Duration: 3 Months
Advisor: Rahul Mehrotra
Spring 2019 / Harvard Graduate School of Design
Project Team: Individual Thesis Work
Within the history
of urban development in India, the emphasis of urban has been recent. The first
landmark commission was created in 1976, 30 years after the country gained
independence. The National Commission on Urbanization headed by Charles Correa
uniquely studied the spatial aspects of urban policy through cartographical
analysis as well as embedded values of holistic and balanced urban development
within their efforts.
Today, the ‘100 Smart Cities’ mission, piloted by Prime Minister Modi, has emerged as a tremendously ambitious project of urbanization in India, to be realized in five years with a budget of approximately 100 crore INR given to each of the chosen 100 cities every year. In contrast to Correa’s NCU, the smart cities mission has been market-oriented and unbalanced in its approach and yet another manifestation of the status-quo approach in planning as it has existed in the national policies implemented in previous decades. Lacking definition and specificity, the overall impacts of the mission at national, regional and city scales are yet to be determined.
Today, the ‘100 Smart Cities’ mission, piloted by Prime Minister Modi, has emerged as a tremendously ambitious project of urbanization in India, to be realized in five years with a budget of approximately 100 crore INR given to each of the chosen 100 cities every year. In contrast to Correa’s NCU, the smart cities mission has been market-oriented and unbalanced in its approach and yet another manifestation of the status-quo approach in planning as it has existed in the national policies implemented in previous decades. Lacking definition and specificity, the overall impacts of the mission at national, regional and city scales are yet to be determined.




Correa had studied the growth of towns as a primary parameter to determine the contextual state of the country. Today, the funding towards any scheme could be considered as a primary way of determining the status of urban development. In a much more neoliberal economy now, architecture and cities becoming larger forces in the engines of development. The primary question is then, how -can we reconcile and balance the market forces but still ensure that the goals of equity and livability are distributed equally. In order to do this, the project treats the tender documents submitted by one hundred selected smart cities in India to analyze the quantity and sources of funding for sectors of development to extract emerging patterns of urbanization as projected and propagated by the implementation of this policy. This section of study immerses itself into studying how layers of economic exchanges and power structures are interrelated to societal aspirations and spatial distributions. Key findings in the paper include the finer statistics as well as the overarching ideologies behind distribution of funds driven through market forces that create unequal spatial distributions across the country, an evident need for harder, basic infrastrutcure and the historical continuation of mobility as primary driver for development.




Finally, the project reduces itself to lived scale and juxtaposes the aerial imaginaries to the realities on the ground and inspects the discrepancies between the data on the documents to the everyday life of built infrastructure. Primarily through using the case of the city of Bhubaneshwar, the project traces the underwhelming nature of a promised paradigm shift. The project concludes with a set of reflections on the study and speculates on a possible strategy to shift the balance towards a more coherent vision towards the planning of future urban India.








Reflection include
the role of designers and planners in reframing the goals of development
through the innovative synergies of conventional modes of development in order to
create hybrid infrastructures that transgress the boundaries of hard and soft. Should
we incorporate Gandhian values to counter Nehruvian forces that have set up the
stage for Indian modernity and reinforced the dialectic between social and
aesthetic modernization today? Here, there is a need for speculation – this
speculation can happen simply through pulling out layers of important
infrastructure projects – industrial corridors, the 100 airports that have been
planned. An investigation into the demographic status of the country through
the inspection of rural and urban quotas, agricultural labor conditions,
population growth and distribution, heritage towns and environmental risk could
all serve to inform the potentials. What are the possibilities that lay within
the country through the integration of these networks? At what scales can we
begin to think – where should we construct territories – and for what purposes?