Revisiting inclusion in smart cities: infrastructural hybridization and the institutionalization of citizen participation in Bengaluru’s peripheries

ABSTRACT

Smart city development can be traced back in the urban development trajectories of cities, as well as the respective articulations, framing and practices of ‘inclusive’ and ‘participatory’ smart cities. As smart city development steadily gains more and more traction among urban policy makers throughout the Global South, many scholars warn for its negative consequences on the accessibility of infrastructure and the processes that transform democratic citizenship practices. Rather than perceiving the transformative power of smart cities as a phenomenon particular to the use of new technologies, this paper aims to analyse societal segregation and marginalization through smart city development and traces these externalities as a continuation or intensification of existing governance practices. This is demonstrated by the case study on the metropolitan city of Bengaluru, that participates in India's national Smart City Mission. Due to massive urbanization, Bengaluru's peripheries are suffering from increasing pressures on its basic infrastructure. In response, state actors have turned to hybridizing the city's infrastructure facilities and governance to market- and civil society actors. Furthermore, the efforts of middle-class civil society groups that contribute to infrastructural governance through the assistance in planning, facilitation and controlling state responsibilities are institutionalized by bureaucratic state actors, at the cost of electoral governance by local representatives. This analysis on infrastructure governance in the peripheries has been set in relation to a discourse analysis of official policy documents on the inclusive and participatory character of smart cities. The practices of hybridization and institutionalization not only undermine the access to basic infrastructure for marginalized groups but also heavily underpin the design of Bengaluru's smart city projects. To be called inclusive, we argue that smart city projects should make an effort to improve the overall accessibilities of infrastructures for all classes and population groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart cities
• inclusivity
• citizen participation
• infrastructural governance
• peripheral development

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, for providing hosting on research location.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Also known as the city of Bangalore.

2 Area-based development projects were projected to cost 1685.13 crore rupees of the total amount of 1792.35 crore rupees. This roughly equals to a €190 million investment of the total €200 million scheduled cost of the SCM projects detailed in Bengaluru's proposal in December 2020 (GoI 2017, p. 77).

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of the research project ‘Inclusive Cities through Equitable access to Urban Mobility Infrastructures for India and Bangladesh’ (PI: Prof. A. Bailey) under the research programme Joint Sustainable Development Goal research initiative, with project number W07.30318.003, which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Utrecht University, The Netherlands.