Atomizing the Smart City: Towards a Flexible Infrastructural Urbanism

In cities across the developing world, a newspin on High Modernist central planning iscoming into style. Fueled by the promise of bigdata and new technologies of urban sensing,the technocratic managerialism of modernismhas found a new host in current urban discourse:the Smart Cities paradigm. Placed inthe context of rapidly-urbanizing India—andmore specifically, in the promises of PrimeMinister Narendra Modi to build one hundredSmart Cities between and atop existingIndian urban centers—this centralized, managerialmodel raises many questions: What ofthe unplanned or unforeseen? What of thecrucial role that informality plays in currentIndian cities? Most fundamentally, what ofthe agency and ingenuity of the Indian peoplethemselves?

Volume Editors
Robert Corser & Sharon Haar

ISBN
978-1-944214-02-9