Rethinking ‘smart’ in India: the city as an ecology of practices

Consistent with the wider global discourse on ‘smart’ cities, in India urban problems are constructed in specific ways to facilitate the adoption of “smart hi-tech solutions”. ‘Smart’ is thus likely to mean technocratic and centralized, undergirded by alliances between the Indian government and hi-technology corporations. I offer an alternative understanding of the city as an ecology of practices, I have highlighted the importance of three constitutive dimensions of ‘smartness’ as distributed, democratic and articulated. It is important to however bear in mind that these three dimensions are not static states to be observed, but rather ever-changing dynamics of life in a city.