Making Delhi a Smart City: Economic Buoyancy with Spatial Justice
With the case of Delhi, the core argument of this chapter is that the Smart Cities Mission appears to present a disjuncture and a severance between the actually existing needs of Indian cities and citizens including the primary goal of creating wealth by
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Making Delhi a Smart City: Economic Buoyancy with Spatial Justice Ashok Kumar and Pradip Kumar Sarkar
Abstract With the case of Delhi, the core argument of this chapter is that the Smart Cities Mission appears to present a disjuncture and a severance between the actually existing needs of Indian cities and citizens including the primary goal of creating wealth by embedding advanced technologies in the built environment without first addressing the basic city problems. Acceptance of New Delhi Municipal Council area as one of the selected 20 smart cities for central funding is puzzling because it further highlights the disjuncture between ground actuality and smart city policy utopia. In order to present these fissures, this chapter first presents five challenges of urbanization facing the city of Delhi. These are the challenges of infrastructure with a specific focus on sanitation, the challenge of mobility, the challenge of environment, the challenge of slums, and the challenge of governance. Separately, these challenges have been discussed, but this is the first attempt when urban development challenges are being discussed in the context of the Smart Cities Mission. These challenges are also selected because they form critical elements of the smart cities generally and the Smart Cities Mission in India particularly. Examining these challenges leads us to explore whether the smart cities, as conceived and currently being built by Indian and global corporate builders, could face up to the challenges presented by the Indian urbanization. The case of Delhi is appropriate within the smart city discourse because it is counted among the top performing metropolitan cities of the country. Core argument of the chapter is that narrowing down the disjuncture between experienced city realities and policy perceptions is useful even for economic growth, the prime public policy goal at the present moment.
Keywords Disjuncture Urban development challenges Economic growth Actually existing city
Spatial justice
A. Kumar (&) Department of Physical Planning, School of Planning and Architecture (SPA D), New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] P.K. Sarkar Department of Transport Planning, School of Planning and Architecture (SPA D), New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 T.M. Vinod Kumar (ed.), Smart Economy in Smart Cities, Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-1610-3_20
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A. Kumar and P.K. Sarkar
Cities as Nodes of Economic Growth
Development narratives after internationalization of the Indian economy have taken a decidedly ‘urban turn,’ where the city is regarded as the centerpiece of economic development along with social and cultural progress. Cities are shown to contribute nearly two-third of country’s gross domestic product largely based on the service sector. Global capital and global financial institutions buttressed by local capital and financial institutions supported by market-friendly state policies make
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