Read post by PI Ayona Datta on how the current COVID19 crisis will affect India’s small cities.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Research Assistant, Shilpa Dahake, introduces Nashik and the ongoing Smart City Project in detail. Specifically, she elaborates on the effects brought about by the Smart Road Project, as well as the sentiments shared by the locals of the area through her interactions with them during her fieldwork.
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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’ “.
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In this piece, Research Assistant, Varun Patil, delves into the beauty of the 63-Acre Burlton Park and introduces the proposed plans for the erection of a Smart Sports Hub. This post celebrates the compendious array of the activities and time spent at Burlton Park by the locals of Jalandhar and touches on the sentiments of supporters and critics on building the said Sports Hub.
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In this piece, Research Assistant, Mahima Taneja delves into the hustle and bustle of Shimla, the Smart city project, as well as her personal musings and fieldwork experience in this smart small city.
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Professor Sanjay Srivastava, project India Principal Investigator and Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University, introduces his previous work related to our project research themes as part of his British Academy Visiting Fellowship 2018 project entitled ‘Satellite Mapping, Big Data and the Politics of Space at the Margins of the Indian City’.
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