 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Leon Morenoz from the School of Planning and Architecture. We are going to discuss the smart cities. Currently there is a hype that we are going to have smart cities. It is not something specific to India, but India we have chosen 100 cities to be the quote unquote smart cities. So what distinguishes the smart cities from the not so smart cities in terms of the basic concept of the city? The smart city the way it is sort of there is no official definition but the larger sort of ideology that is driving it is that we can use information technology in order to either make the city more efficient or rationalize resources. So this is basically what is driving the larger project of the smart city. You know the fundamental issue for a city to me as being a citizen as it were is that what is the city for? Is it for the people? Is it for public good? Is it for essentially a set of economic activities that go into the city or is it for the real estate developers who develop the city? So there could be various ways of looking at a city and do you think the smart city in the sense is a way of looking at the city how to maximize the data that is being generated within the city? You know when the smart city sort of the first trust came out I remember seeing a concept note on I think the smart city website it had Comic Sans font on it and there was a funnel like structure and the entire goal of the smart city was competitiveness. So I mean unlike well I would think larger goals would be about giving people a healthier environment conditions for economic prosperity and services like that. Unfortunately it looks like the smart city at least the initial way in which it was conceived was to sort of bring about competitiveness and this drives back to the larger concept of global cities and you know the way in which one was able to classify them based on how finance would move in and out etc. So I think the smart cities are in some ways a new avatar of the global city phenomenon that Saskin had. That's an interesting proposition now that means there are also two kinds of problems you get. One is you want to set up a smart city quote unquote in virgin territory that is rural areas you want to grow a new city and you start from the beginning having it is quote unquote a smart city which has been tried in a couple of places South Korea there is one case there are other cases in other developing countries and then there is a smart city for instance which already is a city Barcelona London Delhi which are already cities then how do you look at these cities you can't really have a common template for both of these two kinds of cities can you. I don't think yeah you're absolutely right in that we can't really have a similar template and it's kind it's also quite unique to the Indian phenomenon in that sense where it's not really again when you talk about Songdo in South Africa I think Mazda city these were you're right they were virgin sort of cities that sprung out in the middle of nowhere whereas here we've actually seen cities that have competed for smart city funding and about 100 acres to 500 acres of some of that nature has sort of been allocated for major interventions and I think they've been studies that suggest about 97% of the funding is being spent on 3% of the land. So it's sort of unique in the Indian the way the Indian smart city project is. Is it then creating small enclaves essentially and class for essentially well off well the individuals or upper middle class who will get quote unquote global lifestyles in the 3% of the of the space. I think that that's where the paradox lies in the sense that for the city to be sustainable the what's going to drive the city is going to be data it's going to be data driven and these small smart enclaves are for instance in Delhi where we're sitting is just confined to the NDMC area and so these so it's how the how these small little enclaves are going to survive on just this much of data is a little it's sort of a beggars belief that it's only going to be sort of focused on this small portion of land because it doesn't make sense economically or in the long term shall we say that it doesn't really make sense to consider a city on 3% of its land when you are 3% of its citizens but the city is relatively an organic whole in the way the various parts mesh into it the people who work the people who live even of the fact of the land that they also need work for their survival and when you therefore look at the city that the older way of looking at the city was planning the city as a whole and without that this kind of vision really doesn't work for a city. I'm not so sure about the master plan effort also which was looking at the city as a whole because I don't think it looked at the city as an organic whole. Our master plans are at best sort of looking at cities machines that try to then see if how one cog may have worked in the other and you know and therefore it with that metaphor comes in all the trouble of things breaking down and being replaced and some things becoming obsolete and stuff but I think the larger point where for me at least when I look at the smart city is that it completely ignores the larger concept we've had constitutional reforms like the 74th amendment which says that ordinary people are capable of being able to figure out their urban futures and we're not giving them a chance to do that. It's extremely top I mean driven from the center in the way it's conceived and it's also going to be run by anonymous machines that are going to rationalize how you know and some of these smart cities they talk about the fact that you know the machines are going to determine when you open your window or whether you need to open your window or when an elevator will come up to take you down and because it's rationalizing the sources so I think it takes away all of those larger. So it's a further shall we say shift to an even more alienated city but coming to the other issue that you just raised about the 74th amendment and so on which basically meant that the local self-government authorities had certain powers which the citizens decided then the future of the city based on the elected representatives. Now what the smart city agenda seems to be that they will actually give away all their revenues to a certain body which will be non-elected will take decisions for the city on their behalf and they will only have the power to give the money but no authority to decide what they will do this is special purpose vehicles in all which are being created to run the so-called smart city. Isn't that completely a violation of the fundamental rights of the citizen? Absolutely and that's problematic because again like I said we have a constitutional mandate that does suggest that we can make our own plans and we have we now have a CEO it's not even a CEO who will run a company that's how the special vehicle special purpose vehicle is actually registered under the company's act who will again who has no accountability to the local populace who will be selected by the center to oversee this particular company and I think for 30 years or something like that all the revenues will be going back to go back to the to the smart purpose vehicle in order to pay back the cost of capital costs. It's also quite interesting because if you were to look at the most neoliberal of our cities in India I think Navi Mumbai is you will come closest to that they actually saw through this and refused smart city status the first time around I think they've been forced to now try and accept funding for the smart city status but this was something they said so we'll provide the infrastructure the water the electricity the land everything and we won't see a penny for 30 years where's the incentive for the the city the local city to I mean for them to grow economically. Do you think it's even a viable does it make any sense is it viable is it something which really a city can survive in this fashion or do you think this is something which is going to break down very soon and this will really have to be thrown into the waste paper basket very very soon. One of my favorite writers G.K Chesterton he argues that when one views a murder you don't ask whether murder is efficient or inefficient if there's a murder that happens that's the end well so similarly I think the kind of what could I say the methods that have been put in place the structures that have been put in place it might be too late to sort of scrap the city to in you know it it's not a blueprint that can just be scrapped I think it's really tinkering with larger governance mechanisms with things that can't just sort of you know the next day turn around and say that okay we're not going to follow that model if you look at it look at look at Delhi again the Delhi master plan I mean 60 years it was started in 1962 I mean what we have till today are revisions of the master plan right so there's no I don't think especially when it comes to experiments like urban experiments I don't think we can just sort of say this can be scrapped I think we're going to have to live with a lot of these decisions for many many decades to come thank you Leon for being with us and we hope that we can discuss these and other issues in the future as well this is all the time we have for news click today keep watching news click do visit our website and our facebook and our page