Our grandparents' accounts of their childhood are often filled with vivid memories of people, nature, and spaces. The cities of their narration had an undeniable charm even in memory. Such descriptive elements have reduced, in comparison, in our own childhood accounts, in part to the disappearance of the parts and people of the city that we held dear, owing its loss to ‘development'. The voguish 'Smart Cities' have become ubiquitous to the contemporary city, reimagining and retrofitting our cities with 'smart technologies and strategies' to create new narratives to achieve the global city. Our curation of cities to mirror the western glory of growth and control appears like a dreamlike palace on the clouds, afloat in a future we cannot yet hold but can see if we closed our eyes.

In building the Cities of Tomorrow, we are forfeiting the present city of its own right to be, with no foresight of what the future holds for us. At what point then, does the built environment cease to become a part of its own fabric to become a product of an imagined future?

This essay, through a loose narrative reference to the Story of Icarus, critically investigates the Great Cities of Tomorrow and attempts to redefine the terms we are beginning to associate with our lived and imagined urbanscapes through an inward understanding of the notions we hold high as a civilisation. Simply put, it asks: What would the city look like if we care not for what it looks like?

The Smart City scheme has, in many national and international debates around green futures and sustainable urban development, taken centre stage through its warranted frameworks and promising growth towards a progressive tomorrow. Its corresponding portrayal of a glass-walled city with its glacial roads and vitric buildings mushrooming from an only imaginable ground, interconnected through webs of information clouds, embodies a type of techno-utopianism (Wiig, 2015) which propagates that the ever-closer integration of digital technologies into urban life will bring about various economic, environmental, and social benefits in future-focused scenarios (Caprotti, 2018). Undoubtedly and well at par, within a year of his reign over the government, the Indian Prime Minister launched the '100 Smart Cities Mission' in September 2015 and committed to renewing cities such that they are technologically-efficient and citizen-friendly. While the intention to prompt such an endeavor remains commendable, the execution spins a tale too different.

The idyllic strategy of the Indian City of Tomorrow, in a strikingly similar built footprint as the West, stands as a stark contrast to our lived reality in what seems to be an attempt to kill two birds with one stone- It presents the flattering notion to the civilisations beyond that we are taking huge strides away from our status as a 'developing country', and it eludes the needs of the common man with the glorious idea of the future. It garners an image akin to a savior sent from above to eradicateeverything that threatens our progress- The reality of our prejudices, inequalities, and scarcities.

The alliance to such an undertaking then brings to attention two foremost concerns: A. The reimagination of cities to compound a semi-authoritarian and technologically-ruled center masked through its fanciful facades and, B. Our concurrence, as citizens, to this facade as the image of the Great City of Tomorrow.

Large-scale urbanisation of a democracy as extensive as our own brings with it several bureaucratic and democratic nuances. To reimagine and reinstate a city to the order of a Smart City is to interrogate its inherent story, weaving through an intricate fabric of its existent urbanism. Yet, in an attempt to shift the narrative of what ‘development’ looks like, the contemporary city is subjected to the new age of technocracy. Take the example of the demolition of the celebrated Hall of Nations and the Nehru Pavilion, New Delhi, in 2017, in lieu of a 'new, state-of-the-art' Integrated Exhibition and Convention Centre (IECC). Another example is the rather recent hallmark of urban developmentalism- The controversial redevelopment proposal for the iconic precinct of the Capital City, the Central Vista, so as toaccommodate ‘world-class’ infrastructure to perpetuate the idea of a New India. Along the same lines of reimagination, as Gautam Bhan points through his astute analysis of Indian master-plans, are the production of 'Frontiers'. These are zones untouched by history, yet to be conquered or shaped. Sample the corridor-based urbanisation along the Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor or the Delhi-Agra corridor. Set within liminal zones of jurisdiction, they can be planned and produced in their entirety as urban master-plans often attempt to do.

These in-between zones are thus radically developed as ready-to-move-in cities, stitched into our urban network by extensive transportation infrastructure and adorned with 'world-class' amenities, such as those in Dubai and Shanghai. New cities such as Amaravati, the Capital City of Andhra Pradesh, are built from the ground up as well, in an aesthetic reference to the likes of Singapore, rendering a picturesque notion of the future of the Indian state.

A pattern then seems to emerge within these dystopian futures- The words' world-class' and 'state-of-the-art' ring along with our internal association of 'development' and biased fascination to aesthetic modernity. The visual footprint of such imagined futures is tailored to mirror a radically controlled image of growth, one that is bombarded with projections of these internal yearnings. In this sense, the smart city as a utopian vision can be described as significantly modern in the underlying agenda to centrally know, organise, build (or retrofit) and control the city for aims masquerading as progressive development (Caprotti, 2018). It transpires to be a palimpsest of a global capital.

However, as has been pointed out by Ananya Roy, Indian cities can never be planned, in part to the chaos that is inherent to our culture. Bhan further demonstrates how cities’ reimaginations fail because they are fragments of realities that cannot be promoted on an urban whole-scale. So they remain undone, partial and fragmented, accommodating systemic flows that emerge on a rapid-quotidian basis through the voids between the formal and the informal. The contrast between habitation wishes of its population and the plans of those who formally control the boundaries of the city remain in constant tension in the structure of the relationships that create the urban complex (Kamat, Kidambi & Dwyer, 2019). Yet we go on and on, in ouroboros, constructing an environment to control something that might inevitably only slip out of our hands.

Sample the skyline of Mumbai- The city looks like a mosaic of dreams. Some ambitions shoot up to fame in high-rise towers, while many, many are struggling to rise high, in irregular patches surrounding these towers. Even more in number are dreams shattered and dreams unvoiced, snaking along the perimeter of the islands- and so little they occupy of the city that you only notice the blue of their skies upon closer introspection. It may seem to an onlooker that the city is divided into sects of class and privilege, but people of all castes, creed, and gender inhabit this city in a unanimous and unadulterated symbiosis, each a cog to keep the city running on its wheels. The city of dreams, in saying so, is no city without the myriad of people that together form this network of dreams, and what is this city if not for its dreams? Masselos describes the city of Bombay ‘as a series of subsets, reflecting the life and living of individuals and groups within the overall urban construct' (Kidambi, Kamat and Dwyer, 2019).

Straddle back (or forward) to the famed Smart City model: Is this glass-bowl built environment, in all its glory, capable of accommodating the dabbawalas, the struggling actors, the aais selling vegetables along your residential street, the make-shift mid-day schools under the highways? Does it honor their role in the making of the contemporary city? It seems then that the Planners of Tomorrow are envisioning a future without the complexities of our daily life, bandaging the cracks and crevices within our social geographies through an artificial projection of the built environment.

Such narratives of the 'orderly' city are, therefore, narratives of a particular kind of 'good governance', one that pierces through the 'chaos' of the contemporary Indian city to ensure capital, discipline, and order to reign simultaneously. The aestheticization of urban space rules out imaginations of other urban futures that have a more egalitarian potential. (Bhan, 2019)

Bhan (2019) skillfully acknowledges how the visions of contemporary urban master-plan are not only devoid of infrastructure struggles but also of the messiness of democratic politics. The vision of tomorrow is already planned to be devoid of the politics that presently surrounds developmental schemas. However, the foundation of a healthy, democratic city lies in its politics, or rather in the hands of people whose feet are rooted in the ground that we live in. The execution of these urban fantasies calls out on our privilege that resists engaging in domains that involve chaos, turning a blind eye on the sects of communities that these plans conveniently rule out. Through its aesthetic modernity, the urban future creates hierarchies of valued and unvalued spaces and, in the end, of the citizens that inhabit them. (Bhan, 2019)

The relevance of the dystopian future to the modern urban-scape lies in our notions of what w associate ‘smart’ and ‘development’ with, and how our gaps in understanding these terms can distort our realities, leading to a vacuum future. The Smart City may as well be the beacon of hope that we need as a civilisation to sustain our existence, but it becomes redundant when we aim to fly across the clouds, not knowing how to fly. Much like the wings of Icarus, Smart Cities render a patchwork of borrowed solutions to our contemporary cities that are fragile and not well thought of for the long run. In that order, we propose what man has known for eras and eras up till now- Heuristic Cities. In simpler terms, it refers to a decentralised, self-building, and a self-sustainable prophecy of growth. It prominently works on the autopoietic networks and the flows within these networks- material, ideological, human, and so on- that build the city so as to lead us, almost organically, into the safety of a more human, democratic, and inclusive future.

What sets apart the successes of grassroots initiatives and the losses of the Smart City is the consideration of these internal networks. Instead of outsourcing the decision-making to technologically-monitored systems, Heuristic cities employ 'smartness' to learn from and unto itself, re-reading history to analyse patterns of growth and adapting to the changes in our society as we progress. It employs the developments in Artificial intelligence and technology to understand the existing complex networks to guide the planners to make informed and empathetic decisions. The viability of our proposed model, therefore, lies in its capacity to bridge the present inability to look within and beyond certain scales of communities and brings the focus back on the citizens, equipping marginalised communities with solutions that allow them to further their systems and connect to the broader framework of development.

Heuristic Cities demand what has been evidenced throughout history- Urban development not based on a far-off global goal or a western blueprint of progress, but one that acknowledges the chaotic realities of our own, the humanness of our citizens, and the voids between order such that the template of growth comes from an inventory of what exists and what can be, instead of a top-down commentary on what has to be. A Heuristic approach, in essence, and as defined by Tversky and Kahneman, employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational but is sufficient for reaching an immediate goal or approximation. In other words, it embraces and works with the Indian street-philosophy of Jugaad.

The argument of its long-term sustenance and governance presents itself at this suggestion. While it is a fair argument, one must wonder how in the grand scheme of things, what has worked best for communities are systems of their own making- ones that they know how to fix come what may, and ones that become their pride, a unique representation of their communities, such as the Dabbawalas in Mumbai or the fishermen of Chennai. With this, we are not encouraging that there be no framework to align our futures with- Rather, we ask that this inherent pool of knowledge be the basis of building frameworks instead of accommodating these systems into the rigid frameworks of tomorrow.

References

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