Gendering the smart city: A subaltern curation network on Gender Based Violence (GBV) in India

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This two-year research network interweaves urban studies, feminist geography and digital humanities to critically engage with the smart city agenda on women's safety and gender based violence (GBV). It is timely and innovative in approach by bringing together a multidisciplinary collective of feminist and urban geographers, ICT initiatives, feminist NGOs and media artists from UK and India. It shifts the debates around smart urban futures in the global north by focusing on highly marginalized and invisible subaltern citizens of the global south - GBV survivors living in slums and informal settlements of Delhi and Bengaluru. It identifies and addresses the faultlines in current smart city agendas, which seek to resolve key societal challenges of GBV through the technocratic rationality of crowdsourced safety apps.This network draws upon urban studies debates to move away from a 'one size fits all' (Kitchin 2015) critique to examine the diversity of 'actually existing smart cities' (Shelton et. al. 2014) in India. It draws upon feminist geography debates on GBV as 'a form of political, institutional and economic violence' (McIllwaine 2013, 66) and combines the liminality of cyberspace with that of everyday corporeality (Madge and O'Connor 2005) to enable an embodied and gendered approach to the smart city. It uses digital humanities methods to develop the notion of a 'data body' (Critical Art Ensemble 1995) - a virtual entity that is unencumbered by the real and imagined boundaries which structure and control women's everyday experiences with GBV. The network activities will be delivered through two city stakeholder workshops in Delhi and Bengaluru which will share knowledge, build capacity and explore how their smart city agendas of creating safe and sustainable cities can be gendered through the voices, experiences and digital practices of GBV survivors. In particular, each workshop will explore how the existing big data on GBV collected from different sources can be creatively curated. The focus of each workshop will be an interactive digital installation on the gender smart city, co-produced by digital artists and GBV survivors. The network will culminate in a symposium and exhibition in London to foster long-term international collaborations on gendering the smart city across UK and India.Through these activities, the network will answer three research questions. 1: How are smart city agendas addressing challenges of safe cities? We will examine smart city visions, policies, projects and technologies of Delhi and Bengaluru to understand how they aim to address GBV across public and private spaces and deliver on NUA and SDG goals on Gender Equality and New Technologies. 2: What are the 'hotspots' and 'blindspots' of gendered big data on GBV? We will work with our societal partner, to examine the social and spatial unevenness of the gendered big data in their Safetipin app. This currently stands at crowdsourced safety audits of over 50,000 geolocations in Delhi and 10,000 in Bengaluru. We will focus particularly on the invisibility of this data in slums and informal settlements in both cities. in order to understand the reasons behind this we will engage with a range of stakeholders from smart city experts, law enforcement to grassroots GBV organisations.3: How can the data-driven smart city be gendered by GBV survivors? Through our networks in NGOs we will work with GBV survivors in slums by using digital humanities methods (such as networked narratives, garment testimonials, campaign hashtags and augmented mapping) to build specific capabilities for freedom as fundamental rights of all citizens (Nussbaum 2006). The network outcomes will include a project website for knowledge exchange supported by regular social media engagements. Academic outputs include a special issue in a high-impact refereed journal and the development of long term collaborations through a larger research grant application.