Indian Smart Cities: rescaling and digitising local government in India

我的博士论文是关于印度智慧城市使命的，题目是“本土智慧城市：授权还是放松对印度市政府的监管？”通过探索智慧城市使命实施后市政府的权力流动和争夺，研究了使命表达之间的差异。我专注于印度的智能城市，特别是一个案例研究——印度西部的浦那市。通过这个博士后奖学金，我建议通过使用批判性法律地理学作为概念框架来扩展我在智慧城市方面的工作。作为一名地理学家，我建议在伦敦大学伯克贝克分校法律系的跨学科空间内工作，Stewart Motha教授是我的导师。在我的案例研究地点浦那，我采用了一种混合的方法，对民选代表、官僚官员和活动家进行了精英访谈，在联邦一级和地方一级，结合档案研究和政府网站和社交媒体的网络抓取，在政府层级和混合半国有机构的复杂网络中建立权力的形态和流动，这些机构是政府所有的企业实体，但在财务自由裁量权、内部组织灵活性方面具有市场导向，以及较低水平的公民参与和问责”，以揭示智慧城市使命是如何在2015年启动七年后登陆并影响当地政府的。我的研究借鉴了社会人类学的学科，特别关注国家的官僚主义和人类学，以及批判性的城市研究，以解开使命。我的博士研究偏离了对使命的这些解读，并对印度智慧城市的更广泛文献做出了两项新颖的贡献——1)我们应该将智慧城市使命重新定义为殖民地和后殖民时期地方政府规模的调整过程；2)我们需要通过异质“国家”的视角来理解智慧城市使命，并在印度地方政府的背景下，将“公司”和“国家”实体之间的人为划分复杂化。本提案借鉴了我作为人文地理学家对智慧城市使命的博士研究，旨在将现有论文整合为同行评审的已发表论文，并扩展我对智慧城市使命的数字干预措施的一小部分研究，这些干预措施受到印度Covid-19大流行的阻碍。本提案的第一部分（占该提案的75%）侧重于扩展智慧城市使命的法律地理阅读，我认为，与其将使命视为对地方民主政府的新入侵，重要的是将地方民主政府历史化，并承认印度共和国在地方行政方面有着更长的家长式法律和立法历史轨迹，这是一种递归模式公民和地方选举代表扩大和缩小权利的辩证过程可以追溯到19世纪末。我的领域研究的第二个组成部分是数据治理。特派团应该通过鼓励政府服务平台化进程来实现通信数字化。Covid-19大流行中断了我的实地工作，我的联系人在大流行期间成为主要应答者，我无法与他们联系。通过这个博士后奖学金，我打算花25%的时间进行（在线）采访，捕捉印度快速变化的数字治理格局。

My doctoral thesis on the Smart Cities Mission in India, entitled 'Homegrown Smart Cities: Empowering or deregulating Indian municipal government?,' studied the disparity between articulations of the Mission by exploring the flows and contestations of power in municipal government after the implementation of the Smart Cities Mission. I focused on smart cities in India and specifically on one case study - the city of Pune in western India. Through this postdoctoral fellowship I propose to expand my work on smart cities through the use of critical legal geography as a conceptual framework. As a geographer, I propose to work within the interdisciplinary space of the Law Department at Birkbeck, University of London, with Prof. Stewart Motha as my mentor. I relied on a mixed-methodology of elite interviews with elected representatives, bureaucratic officers, and activists, at the federal level and at the local level in my case study site of Pune, combined with archival research and web scraping of governmental websites and social media towards establishing the modality and flows of power within the complex web of interscalar governmental hierarchies and hybrid parastatal agencies that are government-owned corporate entities but have 'a market orientation in their financial discretion, internal organizational flexibility, and lower levels of citizen participation and accountability' towards unpacking how the Smart Cities Mission landed in and affected local government seven years after the Mission had been launched in 2015. My research drew from the disciplines of social anthropology, with a specific focus on bureaucracy and anthropology of the state, and critical urban studies to unpack the Mission. My doctoral research deviated from these readings of the Mission and established two novel contributions to the wider literature on Indian smart cities - 1) that we should reframe the Smart Cities Mission as a process of a colonial and postcolonial rescaling of local government; and 2), that we need to understand the Smart Cities Mission through the lens of the heterogenous 'state' and by complicating the artificial division between 'corporate' and 'state' entities within the context of local government in India.This proposal draws on my own doctoral research, as a human geographer, on the Smart cities Mission with the intention of consolidating the existing thesis into peer-reviewed published papers and extending a small part of my research on the digital interventions by the Smart Cities Mission that were impeded by the Covid-19 pandemic in India. The first part of this proposal (amounting to 75 percent of this proposal) focuses on expanding the legal geography readings of the Smart Cities Mission where I establish that rather than viewing the Mission as a novel intrusion into local democratic government it is important to historicize local democratic government and acknowledge that the Republic of India has a longer trajectory of paternalistic legal and legislative history of local administration that emerges as a recursive pattern of dialectic processes of expanding and contracting rights of citizens and local elected representatives that date back to the late 19th century. The second component of my field research is focused data governance. The Mission was supposed to digitize communication by encouraging a process of platformization of governmental services. The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted my fieldwork, and my contacts became primary respondents during the pandemic, and I was unable to contact them. Through this post-doctoral fellowship, I propose to spend 25 percent of my time on (online) interviews and capture this rapidly changing landscape of digital governance in India.