Socially smart Bhubaneswar: making space for urban informality within postcolonial smart urbanisms

This paper examines the social dimension of smart urbanism that underpins urban developmental politics in the Indian Smart City Mission and ensuing urban forms. Using affordance as an analytical lens, the paper unpacks the social dimension of the Smart City Mission known as “Socially Smart Bhubaneswar,” which has led to a reformatted relationship between marginalized communities, civil society and the state, producing a provincialized form of smart imaginary and reorienting smart urbanisms toward considerations of marginalized citizens in a transitionary moment of affordance. It sheds light on how normative discourses of the smart city are mutated and transformed through interactions with the social dimension of urban planning and governance, which go beyond the high-tech infrastructural initiatives of the smart city. The paper examines the emergent circuits of interaction, contestation and aspirations of the smart city made by civil society, marginalized youth, urban local bodies and state machinery. It expands on the evolving scholarship on Southern smart urbanism and connects the social aspect of smart city development within broader questions of alternative conceptions of smart citizenship and shifting power geometries in the city through smart urbanisms in the postcolonial city.