Smart and eco-cities in India and China

Abstract

Smart and eco-cities have become important notions for thinking about urban futures. This article contributes to these ongoing debates about smart and eco-urbanism by focussing on recent urbanisation initiatives in Asia. Our study of India's Smart Cities Mission launched under the administration of Narendra Modi and China's All-In-One eco-cities project initiated by Xi Jinpin unfolds in two corresponding narratives. Roy and Ong's [2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell] "worlding cities" serves as the theoretical backdrop of our analysis. Based on a careful review of a diverse set of academic literature, policy and other sources we identify five process-dimensions for analysing the respective urban approaches. We show how the specific features of China's and India's urban focus, organisation, implementation, governance and embedding manifest both nations' approaches to smart and eco-urbanism. We argue that India's Smart City Mission and China's All-in-One project are firmly anchored in broader agendas of change that are set out to transform the nation and extend into time. The Indian Smart City Mission is part of a broader ambition to transform the nation enabling her "smart incarnation" in modernity. Smart technologies are seen as the key drivers of change. In China the framework of ecological civilisation continues a 5000-year historical tradition of civilisation excellence. By explicitly linking eco-urbanism to the framework, eco-cities become a means to enact ecological civilisation on the (urban) ground.

Sustainable Development and Resource Productivity

“…As in Israel, IT/ICT is the holy grail for many global powers such as China, India, Japan and Germany at national and local levels alike (e.g. Höffken & Limmer 2019). Racing into innovation, cities in these and other countries run the risk of ignoring or delaying treatment of main carbon-intensive practices as well as risking vulnerability to exogenous ICT-related shocks.…”

Rio de Janeiro como cidade inteligente

“…Este novo e significativo contingente de pessoas nas áreas urbanas levou os governantes locais -em parceria com empresas de tecnologias -a construírem novas cidades, orientadas pela agenda do urbanismo inteligente (cf. HOELSCHER, 2016;HÖFFKEN;LIMMER, 2019). É importante frisar, no entanto, que estas cidades construídas do zero não tinham como objetivo acomodar os novos citadinos -em sua grande maioria, de baixas renda e escolaridade.…”

The role of transformational leadership and institutional entrepreneurship in organizational change in Indian public organizations

“…Recent studies have examined the construction of public infrastructure in developing countries (Cui et al, 2018;Höffken & Limmer, 2019;Rao-Nicholson & Svystunova, 2021;Qiu & Rao-Nicholson, 2021;Chatterjee & Kundu, 2022), and have considered the role of typical public organizations in this context (Morris, 2019;Monstadt & Coutard, 2019;Dolla & Laishram, 2020). Within this context of public infrastructure development, authors have noted a lack of a suitable climate of reform in some cases (Khanna et al, 2021) as well as a lack of entrepreneurial talent to support the expanding demand for new infrastructure in India (Shah & Prakash, 2018;Chertow et al, 2019;Kumar, 2021).…”