Sustainable and ‘smart’ restructuring around the making of mega and world-class cities in India: a critical review

COVID-19 has posed newer questions on urban vulnerabilities in India and showcased the importance of acting effectively towards a vision of sustainable urbanization. Several studies during the pandemic explored the need to make cities socially inclusive and ecologically resilient. The Indian Smart Cities Mission is the flagship urban project that envisions economic growth and ensures technology-induced quality of life in tune with global city-making projects like eco-city, world-class city, green city, etc. Here, we critically examine a range of such neoliberal urban projects and explore the extent to which these cities in their ‘smart’ restructuring embrace a holistic vision of sustainability. We analyse three urban renewal projects: the Lavasa eco-city, the Rajarhat green-city, and the Dholera smart city, arguing why a case-study based approach is significant to study the connection between policy promises and actual socio-environmental realities. Our empirical explorations reveal that processes and practices involved in the making of these projects are ‘utopian’; in reality, they tend to uproot the existing urban ecological buffers, critically impacting the quality of urban life across classes. Beyond the capitalist logic of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, we finally lay out the need to imagine urban commons as scripted with memories, desires, plurality of use, users, and ways of living, and thus to situate the urban planning in practical visions of sustainability and environmental resilience.