Incongruities of a Socialistic Smart City: a Case of Area Based Development in T. T. Nagar, Bhopal

The Smart City mission, launched in 2015, has selected 99 cities all over India to participate in the vision of smart and sustainable living. This further initiated a chain of urban renewal projects among these cities in an attempt to produce a perfect model to instigate close association and development of nearby towns and villages, in collaboration with the Union Ministry of Urban Development. Bhopal has acted swiftly in response to this challenge, coming up with an Area Based Development(ABD) plan right in the city core in T.T. Nagar. Being a provincial city possesing several contextual assets like state-owned lands in the city centre, Bhopal has introduced this ABD as the first in India to be a redevelopment and rehabilitation project. It has been envisaged to develop with state of the art infrastucture and technological and ‘smart’ interventions. However, the project proposes extensive involvement of private sector and joint ventures which produces a requirement of huge capital of 2500 crores for execution (Bhopal Smart City Corporation Limited, 2016). The government of Bhopal intends to recover this investment through large-scale real estate models and commercial frameworks catering for the needs of higher socio-economic sections of the area and private organisations, leaving behind a cluster of untended and economically weak communities. This contradicts the socialistic role of government in policy-making and execution. This research intends to assess and re-imagine criterias for site selection of ABD in a smart city to act as a driver of development, rather than a caterer of developed city-centres. The study also examines the role of government and people indeciding these criterias by assessing varying scenarios of deliverables at core and periphery, establishing the need of additional participatory frameworks in centre-introduced initiatives such as the Smart City mission