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Title	Smart Urbanization In India: Engagement, Participation, And Citizenship In Pune Smart City
ID_Doc	51689
Authors	Ravi C.; Pathak P.; Gandhi P.
Year	2025
Published	Inclusive Cities and Global Urban Transformation: Infrastructures, Intersectionalities, and Sustainable Development
DOI	http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-7521-7_3
Abstract	The chapter examines the particular type of urbanization favored by the smart city paradigm; India’s Smart Cities Mission; and the top-down, elite-centered, citizen engagement it has created in Pune city. The chapter begins by summarizing the smart city development approach’s focus on capacity-building, mobility, and smart governance. It then looks at India’s flagship Smart Cities Mission and its attempts to engage citizens through extensive deployment of ICT tools. Such attempts have met with very limited success owing to the top-down nature of decision-making by policymakers, digital divide in terms of gadget ownership, and online portal designs primarily geared towards information dissemination rather than active citizen engagement in the planning process. The chapter focuses in particular on the city of Pune and uses data gathered from a survey of 310 respondents from 2020 to 2021 to highlight the limitations of top-down communication strategy that is unable to equalize caste, class, gender, and digital access-related differences. The result is a citizen engagement process that fails to engage a variety of stakeholders, confers disproportionate influence on elite English-speaking, caste-class privileged, tech-savvy citizens with better access and ability to navigate ICT tools. Thus, the planning process for smart city development in Pune highlights the preference of administrators to rely on ICT tools for citizen engagement due to their ease of deployment but such convenience-based thinking selects for elite citizens and blocks out the voices of the poor and marginalized, thus resulting in a narrow technocratic governance over a more democratic collaborative governance. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2025.
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