The smart city as a “digital turn” in critical urban geography has gone largely unnoticed in postcolonial urbanism. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence of new forms of ...postcolonial citizenship at the intersection of digital and urban publics. In particular, I investigate the production of a “smart citizen” in India's 100 smart cities challenge – a state‐run inter‐urban competition that seeks to transform 100 existing cities through ICT‐driven urbanism. By examining the publicly available documents and online citizen consultations as well as observations of stakeholder workshops in four of the proposed smart cities, I illustrate how a global technocratic imaginary of “smart citizenship” exists alongside its vernacular translation of a “chatur citizen” – a politically engaged citizen rooted in multiple publics and spatialities. This takes place through three key processes – enumerations, performances and breaches. Enumerations are coercions by the state of an urban population that has so far been largely hidden from analogue technologies of governance and governmentality. Articulations are the performances of smart citizenship across digital and material domains that ironically extend historic social inequalities from the urban to the digital realm. Finally, breaches are the ruptures of the impenetrable technocratic walls around the global smart city, which provides a window into alternative and possible futures of postcolonial citizenship in India. Through these three processes, I argue that subaltern citizenship in the postcolony exists not in opposition, but across urban and digital citizenships. I conclude by offering the potential of a future postcolonial citizen who opens up entangled performances of compliance and connivance, authority and insecurity, visibility and indiscernibility across political, social, urban and digital publics.
Insight into the socio-technical dynamics of infrastructure unbundling and the impact on urban space is perhaps one of the most enduring conceptual legacies of the Splintering Urbanism thesis. ...Expanding the analysis of urban infrastructure beyond the material has enabled a reconsideration of the socio-material dynamics contained therein and the actors represented. Two decades later, digital disruptive commercial enterprises such as Uber and Airbnb have broadened this playing field as Silicon Valley enters the local urban realm. This piece reflects on the extent to which this reconfiguration of urban services, media, and technology affect the market forces and range of choices available to urban dwellers. By considering the relationships between platforms and space and the infrastructural elements of such, the paper concludes on the notion of "splintering by proxy:" how the use of digital platforms enrolls the urban dweller as an active contributor in the continued shaping of urban space through distributed agency. This creates opportunities for emancipatory practices that could contribute to more inclusive cities.
A burgeoning do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism movement is gaining notice in American and global cities as amateur designers create and implement small-scale interventions in urban public spaces. While ...tactics vary widely and may have some benefits for certain users, they nonetheless have the potential to complicate careful and considered long-term planning and urban design strategies. This article describes the historical and recent precedents upon which the current DIY urbanism movement is built and evaluates DIY interventions in light of their implications for cities, particularly how cities might engage with DIY projects in ways that maximize their potential for positive change while meeting objectives such as public safety, equity, and adherence to long-range visions.
On the anniversary of the publication of Splintering Urbanism, climate breakdown heralds a new era in public investment in infrastructure. However, current proposals for infrastructure overlook two ...decades of work in infrastructure studies. For example, both the Green New Deal advanced by activists in the United States and the European Green Deal, proposed by the European Commission, establish a dual logic between investments in centralized systems and off-grid systems that reinforce, rather than challenge, the infrastructure models critiqued in Splintering Urbanism. The lessons of Splintering Urbanism debates, such as the rise of post-networked conditions of living in dialogue with everyday practices of living with and against infrastructures, are still missing from the policies that will likely shape urban futures.
Urban change, and the failure of conventional, post-war planning and development in Glasgow has left a legacy of vacant and derelict land in the city. This represents an underutilised asset that can ...be brought back into use as a public resource, contributing to the city's regeneration, and helping to slow the rate of population loss to the suburbs. Access to this land resource, primarily for housebuilding, can be assisted by the adoption of the principles of plot-based urbanism. Plot-based urbanism offers an innovative approach to development, based on an urban structure made up of fine-grained elements, in the form of plots, capable of incremental development by a range of agencies. The morphological study of traditional, pre-war masterplanning methods in Glasgow suggests that a typically disaggregated pattern of land subdivision remains of great relevance for development, and that the physical form and organisation of urban land may enhance the capacity for neighbourhood self-organisation. This study undertakes analysis of historic changes in plot formation, and uses the results to suggest ways of making housing investment more informed and responsive to urban change. It derives core principles of land subdivision, and presents these principles in a set of normative design codes that can be used to pass effective control over the process of land subdivision in regeneration areas to a range of potential developers. By doing so, activity in housing-led regeneration can be increased beyond the rate possible by our current reliance on existing public and private development models. It is argued that the publicly-funded sector could take on the role of lead provider of opportunity, through the adoption of new plot-based development processes, thereby supporting communities in the sustainable reuse of vacant inner-city land.
This paper introduces the concept of “bypass urbanism” to account for a process of urbanization that is reordering center-periphery relations of urban regions into new hierarchies. Bypass urbanism ...became visible through a comparison of large-scale urban transformations at the peripheries of Kolkata, Lagos, and Mexico City by zooming out and considering their impacts on the socio-spatial structure of the extended urban regions. Bypass urbanism is not emerging from the construction of a singular new town or real estate project, but is the result of the simultaneous development of an ensemble of various independent but related projects. Therefore, bypass urbanism usually does not emanate from a coherent planning initiative, even less so from a hidden “master plan” at the hands of any single developer or state agency, but it emerges through a convergence of interests over large areas of land at the geographical periphery of urban regions that have been made available for new urban developments by various measures. We understand bypass urbanism as a multidimensional process that includes material-geographical bypassing, the bypassing of regulatory frameworks, and socio-economic bypassing in everyday life. It results in the creation of exclusive and excluding spaces that enable middle and upper-class lifestyles, at the same time leading to the peripheralization of extant urban areas that are bypassed and neglected. The massive scale of bypass urbanism that we have observed represents a new quality of urban development resulting not in isolated urban enclaves or archipelagos, but in the fundamental restructuring of the extended urban region with far reaching and incalculable repercussions.
In this essay, we explore the concept of urbanity in approaching three texts in the Architecture and Urbanism field, collating them with three works on this theme in Urban Anthropology. We verify in ...these articles the attempts to operationalize this concept for using it in the design process. Next, we visit three works in Urban Anthropology, in search of its views on urbanity. We argue that urbanity is an essential dimension of citizenship, to be considered in the design process, as well as other measurableparameters.
Technological modes of urbanism continue to transform and expand with new technologies, new actors, and new developments that are ripe for critical geographical analysis. This series of interventions ...focuses on capturing and understanding a still evolving movement called platform urbanism, which is centered around the growing presence and power of digital platforms in cities. This different mixture of capital-technology-cities tends to be more directly connected to consumers, more intent on rapid scaling, and more antagonistic to governments and incumbent industries. This series lays out how the emergence of platform urbanism is already provoking serious issues related to the oversight, operation, and ownership of urban services and spaces. Thematically, the series is organized around making sense of different geographical relationships at the center of platform urbanism. This contribution focuses on the dual production of space (digital/physical) and value (data/money) within cities.
We present evidence that New Urbanism, defined as a set of normative urban characteristics codified in the 1996 Charter of the New Urbanism, reached a seminal moment—in mission if not in name—with ...the 2016 New Urban Agenda, a landmark document adopted by acclamation by all 193 member states of the United Nations. We compare the two documents and find key parallels between them (including mix of uses, walkable multi-modal streets, buildings defining public space, mix of building ages and heritage patterns, co-production of the city by the citizens, and understanding of the city as an evolutionary self-organizing structure). Both documents also reveal striking contrasts with the highly influential 20th century Athens Charter, from 1933, developed by the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne. Yet, both newer documents also still face formidable barriers to implementation, and, as we argue, each faces similar challenges in formulating effective alternatives to business as usual. We trace this history up to the present day, and the necessary requirements for what we conclude is an ‘unfinished reformation’ ahead.
PDF
