“Eyes and Ears”: Surveillance in the Indian Smart City

Critical geographies of smart development

“…Ayona Datta (2015, 2018) brings postcolonial theory to bear on smart cities, locating India's imagined smart citizens not only in a global turn towards digital technologies, but also in a longer genealogy of utopian urban planning and subaltern traditions of resourcefulness. Her work provides one example of a growing literature that embeds smart initiatives within postcolonial power relations in urban sites (Datta & Odendaal, 2019; Purandare & Parkar, 2020; Söderström et al, 2021; Watson, 2015, 2016). While critical scholarship often centres the smart city (Kitchin, 2019; Rose et al, 2021; Shelton et al, 2015), emerging research highlights similarities between Green Revolution and data revolution projects to modernise ‘backward’ agricultural economies through technology (Fairbairn & Kish, 2022), locates contemporary digital agriculture initiatives within American histories of racialised dispossession (Liu & Sengers, 2021), and analyses ICTs within intergenerational relationships to living landscapes marked by settler‐colonialism (Duarte, 2017).…”

Digital Legacies and Distressed Capacities

“…States and municipalities use these new technologies to implement a variety of municipal functions ranging from urban planning and delivering services to actively engaging citizens. In policy documents, technologies are promoted as offering the following dual benefits (Purandare and Parkar 2021): service delivery is faster, generates new solutions for urban problems through data and automation, and improves information exchange; it has also been said that citizens have greater access to urban services, enhanced transparency, and scrutiny and are able to participate in the governance of the city.…”