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：赋予印度市政府权力还是放松管制？”通过探索智慧城市使命实施后市政府权力的流动和分配，研究了使命表述之间的差异。我专注于印度的智慧城市，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，我建议通过使用关键的法律的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，我打算在伦敦大学伯克贝克分校法律系的跨学科空间内工作，斯图尔特·莫萨教授是我的导师。我依靠一种混合的方法，在联邦和地方一级，在我的案例研究地点浦那，与当选代表、官僚和活动家进行精英访谈，结合档案研究和政府网站和社交媒体的网络抓取，以建立跨等级政府层级和混合半国营机构的复杂网络内的权力模式和流动，这些机构是政府-这些公司拥有法人实体，但"在财务自由裁量权、内部组织灵活性和较低的公民参与和问责水平方面存在市场导向“，以揭示智慧城市使命如何在2015年推出使命七年后登陆并影响地方政府。我的研究借鉴了社会人类学的学科，特别关注国家的官僚制度和人类学，以及批判性的城市研究，以解开使命。我的博士研究偏离了这些对使命的解读，并为印度智慧城市的更广泛文献做出了两项新的贡献- 1）我们应该将智慧城市使命重新定义为殖民和后殖民重新调整地方政府规模的过程;和2），我们需要通过异质“国家”的透镜来理解智慧城市的使命，并通过复杂化人为的划分，印度地方政府背景下的“企业”和“国家”实体。这一提议借鉴了我自己作为人类地理学家对智慧城市使命的博士研究成果，目的是将现有的论文整合成同行评议的已发表论文，并扩展我对智慧城市使命数字干预的一小部分研究，这些干预受到印度新冠肺炎疫情的阻碍。本建议的第一部分（占本提案的75%）我的重点是扩展智慧城市使命的法律的地理解读，我在其中确立了，而不是将使命视为对地方民主政府的新入侵，重要的是要将地方民主政府历史化，并承认印度共和国在地方行政的家长式法律的和立法历史上有更长的轨迹这是一种递归模式，体现了公民和地方民选代表权利的扩大和缩小的辩证过程，可追溯到19世纪末。我的实地研究的第二个组成部分是集中的数据治理。使命是通过鼓励政府服务平台化进程来促进沟通。新冠肺炎疫情打断了我的实地考察，我的联系人在疫情期间成为主要回应者，我无法联系到他们。通过这个博士后奖学金，我计划将25%的时间花在（在线）采访上，并捕捉印度快速变化的数字治理景观。

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.