Smart ignorance: Instrumentalising useful unknowns to bureaucratise and rescale power in the city

Abstract

Critical geography inextricably associates smart cities with modalities of entrepreneurial governance, the privatisation of government assets and functions, and an effectively diminished role of the state in urban governance. In this article, I argue that this is an incomplete examination of ‘actually existing smart cities’ as it overlooks the bureaucratisation of city government through rescaling, which occurs via the instrumentalisation of ambiguity and ignorance. Furthermore, the existing literature focuses on the rescaling of power in ‘spaces of exception’ or enclave developments, but does not adequately address what happens when these corporate parastatal entities land in ‘actually existing’ cities where urban spatialities and political geographies are alreacy established and do not need to be formulated afresh. I draw on rich qualitative research in one case study of an ‘actually existing’ smart city – Pune in western India – to explore how the implementation of a smart cities programme results in a bureaucratisation of city government through existing useful unknowns, and generates further ambiguity around issues of authority and power in city government. This article offers a significant conceptual contribution to the understudied political geographies of city government by moving beyond the examination of zones of exception and investigating the dynamics of integrating privatised governance mechanisms into a historical ‘actually existing smart city’ with a formalised city government dating back to the late 19th century.