The Digital City: Policy, People, Spaces

This research theme takes an interdisciplinary approach to urban studies and digitalisation. It is interested in the following subthemes:

• Policy: Contemporary global and Indian public policy focuses on digital strategies to improve the governance of cities. Policy often takes the vocabulary of smart cities, data-driven governance, AI cities to promote the adoption of ICT. In addition, policy also imagines urban development by hosting global capital from IT industries. Cities like Hyderabad and the planned Future City closely follow the state’s discourse on IT industry-driven urbanisation. This subtheme focuses on evaluating policy narratives, instruments and processes around urbanisation and digitalisation. This subtheme combines methods such as computational analysis of policy with qualitative methods.
• Platforms: Cities are the sites of intense platformisation, often referred to as ‘platform urbanism’. Platformisation includes both commercial platforms such as Uber and Google Maps that are redefining the way we access our cities, but also government platforms to manage urban services, automate decision-making and enable government access for citizens. This subtheme encourages empirical thinking around the design, development and implementation of platforms for urban governance. These include platforms for citizens’ services, traffic regulation, resource management, and municipal monitoring. This subtheme combines tech-centric methods such as code-reviews and ethnographies.
• Infrastructures: While ‘classical’ urban infrastructures such as roads, pipelines, electricity networks are central to the functioning of cities, government programs have been focused on deploying and integrating digital infrastructures such as sensors, networks, databases, data centres in the urban space. Some of these are seen as integral to managing urban services such as traffic and public transport while others are dedicated towards citizens’ surveillance. How do these infrastructures affect the governance of cities, the design and redevelopment of urban spaces, and the access of citizens to the city. This subtheme combines understanding IoT devices and the study of urban spaces.
• Data: ‘Data-driven governance’ has been a foundational concept for urban policies and programs over the last decade. This subtheme understands how data is collected, analysed, processed, stored and utilized by government agencies. It also welcomes work on data platforms, public conceptions around data, public access to data, data and surveillance, citizens’ data. Projects on creating public data archives, creating urban data sources, reimagining the use of urban data are encouraged.
• People: Digital technologies of urban governance have a clear ‘user’ – the citizen and the bureaucrat. This subtheme evaluates the experience of citizens access to digital services, change in citizen-government relationships and how citizens are surveiled. At the same time, while senior bureaucrats monitor data through dashboards towards better decision-making, street-level bureaucrats are burdened by multiple apps, changing work patterns due to digital surveillance, and working with digital infrastructure. This subtheme studies the interactions of people with technology and its outcomes.
• Spaces: As digitalization drives contemporary urbanisation, our cities are seeing rapid transformations in the way they are planned, organized, built and delivered. The embedding of digital infrastructure in the city, the creation of IT zones, diverting of resources for data centres, the changing land-use in urban peripheries are notable spatial transformations. This subtheme is focused on understanding how cities are transforming and how citizens’ access to the city is being shaped.

Faculty involved: Khaliq Parkar