Study title

The data being archived is drawn from interviews and participant content from the MMA app at the case study sites with members of the community being affected by the proposed smart city projects. These are interviews conducted at six case study sites with individuals and groups who are regular users of space at these sites. The themes cover histories of engagement with these spaces, community and business histories, personal geographies, and narratives of negotiating political engagements with various city-level actors such as local politicians, the municipality, and police.The coming of an Indian urban age has highlighted the challenges of rapid urbanisation and rural-urban migration in planning for sustainable futures. In India, solutions to this challenge are imagined in two interlinked programmes of Digital India and 100 Smart Cities that claim to present a new 'certainty' of governing urban futures. This project begins with the hypothesis that 'small cities' are the test-beds of experiments in 'futuring', since a majority of current smart city proposals are in cities with population < 3 million. These small cities present a 'double gap' in our knowledge of urban futures since a) there is uncertainty around the role that they will play in delivering on the challenges of India's urban age, and b) there is a research gap in understanding how their futuring is translated into 'actually existing' smart cities in India. This two year project will critically learn from the dynamics of change in small cities as they are transformed by smart technologies and infrastructures. It will use interdisciplinary approaches from urban, social and cultural geography, as well as sociology and geoinformatics to learn from three small cities - Shimla, Jalandhar and Nashik. Conceptually, we approach 'small cities' not as demographically defined entities but as 'ordinary cities' with specific social, cultural, political, and historical contexts of 'smallness' that has kept them...