Read post by PI Ayona Datta on how the current COVID19 crisis will affect India’s small cities.

PI Ayona Datta argues that our access to urban history is now determined by algorithms programmed to recognise the past as a repository of maps and images on the web. This has transformed the way that the urban poor ‘see’ the city, see themselves in the city and thus imagine possible futures for themselves.

Read post by PI Ayona Datta which traces the planning applications for houses built by working classes since the late 19th century. These house biographies remind us that Shimla’s current tourist spectacle above is made possible because of the continued house building by the poor and working classes since the dawn of the Empire.

Project PI Ayona Datta introduces Shimla, through the paradoxes of speed, time and slowness in the future smart city. While Shimla dreams of a smart urban future, the everyday life in its informal settlements along the shifting sliding hill slopes reminds us that this dream needs to adjust to the slow contoured life of the hills.

Project PI Ayona Datta introduces Sudama Bazaar in Jalandhar through the transnational connections that make smart city proposals irrelevant for both older and younger generation of traders. While the ‘Smart Chowk’ proposals create a disillusionment of the future, smart citizens are seen as those who are able to emigrate to the West to access better opportunities and hope for the future.

In this blog post, Post-doctoral Research Associate, Srilata, shares about her archival adventures in Jalandhar. She talks about how we must embrace the rich lived experiences and politics of place as well as trace continuities between the past, present and future in order to justly write about the city with integrity rather than, in her words, “through a vacuous notion of ‘smartness’ “.