The quote above from the Shakespearean tragedy Coriolanus aptly sums the problem in
envisioning the future of Panjim today. While hectic activity is afloat to
garner ‘opinions’ of what needs to be done to make the capital a Smart City,
one wonders if we have forgotten the meaning of ‘smart’ today, or for that
matter what is meant by a ‘city’ itself.
The biggest problem of the ‘smart city
movement,’ is that the promoters of such an approach tend to repackage the city
in a generic global form without understanding the historical significance of
the existing city (both the form and the people). The Smart City concept
largely harps on using digital technologies to supposedly improve the quality
and the performance of urban services. The issue is really which services? They
normally mean roads, flyovers, parking, digital communication, etc, while what
we in Panjim actually need are services like mass housing, wider pavements,
barrier-free designs, shaded pedestrian pathways, reliable public
transportation, and so forth.
Speaking at the event of a high level meeting
on smart cities, organized by the European Union in Brussels in September 2014,
architect and professor Rem Koolhas pointed
that in the projection of the smart city concept, values of liberty, equality,
and fraternity have been replaced by comfort, security, and sustainability. These
values that the Smart City movement promotes are clearly of contemporary
upwardly mobile and elite groups today. Reinforcing these values will have
serious consequences for the poor who do not have access to ‘smart’ resources.
As I have reflected in earlier columns, Goa is already facing the onslaught of
the demands of elite groups that use Goa as a pleasure periphery and a getaway
from the problems of India. It should not be that rather than addressing the
livelihood issues of locals, the Smart City concept with its pro-elite values
becomes just one more vehicle for appropriation of the city from the locals.
The sociologist Saskia
Sassen argues that globalized cities the world over replicates one another.The concept
of ‘smartness’ comes in particularly in regard to positioning thecity as a
‘generic’ global city, therefore making it easier for these locations to serve
the needs of speculative real-estate investors and corporations. Rather
than open up the city to even greater predatory real-estate investments,
Panjim, as much as the rest of Goa, needs to be seen as a special case of
urbanism, one that is a result of a unique historical evolution, both at the
level of physical form as much as through its citizenship. An uncritical
embrace of the smart city project in Panjim threatens to make it just another
site of globalization by erasing its unique identity, both in terms of being a
place and privileging it as a playground of global elites rather than the home
of its people.
In her article Is India’s 100 smart cities project a recipe for social apartheid? (The
Guardian, 7 May 2015), Shruti Ravindran highlighted
similar concerns. Ravindran questions whether the emergence of hi-tech
prototype cities in India will override local laws and use surveillance to
“keep out” the poor. One of the first designated smart cities in India is the
Gujarat International Financial Tec-city (GIFT), in Gandhinagar. Ravindran
notes that the beating heart of GIFT is its “command and control centre”, which
keeps traffic moving smoothly and monitors every building through a network of
CCTVs. She observes that in the country where more than 300 million people live
without electricity, and twice as many don’t have access to toilets, GIFT
city’s towers are like hyperthrophic castles in the sky.
The entrepreneurs of digital technologies have
made the city their domain especially by referring these designated cities as ‘smart.’
Often unnoticed is the fact that the metaphor of 'smart' in the concept of the
smart city evokes the smart phone as a comparison for the development of the city.
Such an approach is problematic, for it renders the city as a commodity, and a
'generational' one at that. This is how one thinks of technological developments,
where preference is given to new generations of phones and computers, and the
trashing of older generations. Rather than working with something, the
existing object is rendered obsolete even before its time in favour of
something shinier and newer. Following this logic, just because Panjim is
designated as ‘smart’, are the rest of the cities in Goa condemned to being
stupid?!
What is the need of the hour is the concept of
‘good city’. The good city is the ultimate memorial of our struggles and
glories: where the pride of the past is set on display (Kostof:1991,p.16). The
pride of Panjim as in other cities of Goa lies in the architecture of the city:
in terms of the scale, the extrovert forms of the buildings, their unique
architectural styles, and the sheltered spaces for pedestrians. We therefore
must show extreme sensitivity in managing these assets and initiating
pro-public and egalitarian infrastructural development . The city of cannot be
designated as smart global city merely to push newer developments that do not
pay respect to the historical context. Instead what we need is to build on
Panjim’s past to make it even more open, accessible and friendly to its people.
[This article was first published on The Everyday Goan on 8th November 2015]
[This article was first published on The Everyday Goan on 8th November 2015]
