The Making of Smart Citizenry Decoding Smart Citizen

Deepak Kumar ()
Additional contact information
Deepak Kumar: Asian Development Research Institute, Patna

Smart Cities and Regional Development (SCRD) Journal, 2023, vol. 7, issue 2, 85-96

Abstract: Ayona Datta (2017) highlights how the digital turn in the post-colonial cities in India has allowed the coercive power of state to control and discipline citizenry by making them actively engage in governance; while the active citizenry is just a smokescreen, a proxy to provide the larger legitimacy to the smart city project and rather the citizenry is paternalised and handheld through the emerging technologies of government. She argues, in the process, the emergence of alternative citizenry is cast and their reflections need to be gauged from the perspective of subaltern and others who defy the digital turn and its wider network. In this backdrop, the article examines the discursive construction of smart citizenry under India s Smart Cities Mission. Drawing on the discourse analysis of 100 smart city proposals, the article contends that the Mission creates a false binary of active and passive citizenship with implications on the citizenship rights. It is further argued that that the Mission has a very narrow understanding of active citizenship, limited to just giving tacit consent to smart city projects. This is depicted in proposals calling for smart, active, duty-bearing, responsible citizenry lack of which risk jeopardize the success of smart cities.

Keywords: smart citizen; smart cities; smart cities mission; citizenship rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://scrd.eu/index.php/scrd/article/view/403/368 (application/pdf)
https://scrd.eu/index.php/scrd/article/view/403 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pop:journl:v:7:y:2023:i:2:p:85-96

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Smart Cities and Regional Development (SCRD) Journal from Smart-EDU Hub, Faculty of Public Administration, National University of Political Studies & Public Administration Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Professor Catalin Vrabie ().