Learning from small cities: Governing imagined futures and the dynamics of change in India's smart urban age

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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 'off the map' of urban studies. This project will focus on three interlinked scales - state, city and citizen through the following research questions: 1. How and why do small cities become the test-beds of state imaginations of India's urban futures?At a national scale, we will explore how and why state visions of 'futuring', through Digital India and 100 Smart Cities programmes, make specific 'assets' in small cities worthy of incubating these imaginaries. Specifically, we will investigate the genealogies of 'futuring' in India's urbanization and its links to current visions of smart cities. 2. How do small cities translate state imagined urban futures into 'actually existing' smart cities? Building on RQ1, we will explore how small cities imagine their own urban futures, through particular smart city projects. Specifically, we will examine how small cities learn to innovate by championing their 'assets' in a competitive international context while negotiating for more autonomous roles in governing their futures. 3. How do citizens of small cities 'live with change' induced by smart city developments? Following on from RQ1 and 2 above, we will investigate how smart city projects are perceived by those citizens who are targets of these projects at the neighbourhood level; how they are experienced, negotiated, challenged and supported. This takes 'futuring' as a lived experience of change where everyday knowledge of community assets, resources and infrastructures will be used to inform smart city policies at larger scales. 4. How can we 'learn' from small cities to inform practices of 'thinking' and 'doing' urban policy? This brings together the above RQs to take learning as a reflective practice in urban theory and policy. Specifically, we will focus on how learning occurs at three interlinked scales of state, city and citizen and how this transform the ways that we might imagine global urban futures. The project will use a range of interdisciplinary, digital, visual and participatory methodologies. In each of these cities, we will undertake analysis of imagined urban futures through longitudinal mapping and analysis of physical and social transformations, crowdsourced digital and community asset mapping and interviews with stakeholders and 'beneficiaries' of smart city projects. The findings will direct specific pathways to impact including an animated infographic of smart city asset toolkit, local language policy briefing pamphlets, dedicated website, blogs, project conference, exhibition and catalogue.