The allure of ‘smart city’ rhetoric

Datta’s (2015: 3) article on a new phase of utopian urbanization in India gives fascinating insight into how linked global and local forces are reshaping the urban landscape on this continent. For those tracking similar processes on the African continent (Watson, 2015: 37), the Indian story is of particular interest as urban visions there seem to foreshadow what is to come in Africa. Images of future Indian cities mimicking the skylines of Dubai, Singapore and Shanghai began to emerge there some 5 to 10 years ahead of their appearance in sub-Saharan Africa. On the African continent, faster rates of urbanization and economic growth, particularly after 2008, have also been accompanied by a phase of utopian urbanization in which graphic images almost identical to the Indian ones have been imposed on cities, which in reality are desperately poor and largely informal. Comments on international property developer websites, which refer to African cities as the ‘last property development frontier’, give an indication of the economic interests behind these new city visions. Pronouncements from investment analysts such as McKinsey & Company (2012) that Africa is economically the second fastest growing region in the world, that by 2035 it will have a larger workforce than India or China and that it is set to urbanize faster than these two regions have no doubt excited the interest of the international property development sector, which can anticipate a steadily rising demand for urban projects and infrastructure.

Datta (p. 12) describes the way in which utopian visions for Dholera have, over time, adopted different labels to entice urban entrepreneurs, shifting from ‘knowledge city’ to ‘global city’, ‘eco city’ and more recently ‘smart city’. She correctly argues that the ambiguity brought about by shifting labels and superficial marketing terms is all part of the entrepreneurial urbanization model, which makes it harder to understand and critique exactly what is being planned. Similarly the earlier African urban visions claimed the title of ‘eco’ (such as Lagos’ Eko-Atlantic), whilst the more recent ones (such as Nairobi’s Konza Techno-city satellite and Hope City outside Accra) claim smart city status. Most also claim that this will somehow bring ‘world-class’ status.

In my own work (Watson, 2014) on African ‘fantasy cities’, I have drawn on Acuto (2010) who uses Bourdieu’s notion of ‘symbolic power’ in the context of Dubai to explain its attempt to claim 21st-century global city status. For Dubai, this has involved the production of narratives promoting the city and addressed to global elites; it implies a concern with the importance of a city in relation to other cities rather than the extent to which it functions for its citizens. One important vehicle for promotional narratives in aspiring global cities is the built environment, which not only has to be ‘modern’ but also has to display an iconic architectural identity; skyscrapers (towers) are commonly used but also ultra-modern and distinctive airports, trade centres, office blocks and retail centres. In Africa, as in India, the form and aesthetics of the built environment are what really count. Graphics on consultant websites show glass-box towers, manicured lawns and water features and uncongested freeways (with no sign of informal street traders or shack settlements); they pretend that here is a city with no poverty and unemployment, where global capital is welcome and can operate without constraint. The term fantasy city seems appropriate here in part because of the fundamental gap between the vision of these future cities on developer websites and the reality of poverty in the actually existing city and in part because the possibilities of these city visions being implemented seem very remote.

Datta’s position that (certainly in Dholera) these aesthetics and the labelling that goes with them are no more than utopian imaginings, which prioritize urbanization as a business model is valid as well on the African continent. The new master plans ¹ for African cities that claim to be sustainable, or to produce eco cities or smart cities, rarely seem to bother with the detail to show how they meet these qualities. The glass-box tower buildings will be highly reliant on uninterrupted power supplies to keep services such as lifts and air conditioning operational, but in many African cities power is intermittent with many buildings having to rely on their own generators. The extensive landscaping depicted in many of the master plan graphics would be dependent on irrigation systems in cities where only a small percentage of the population has the luxury of piped water. And the urgent need for affordable public transport systems in cities where the majority of the population are too poor to afford a private vehicle is clearly ignored, as shown by the spacious boulevards and freeways in these graphics. Similarly the label ‘smart’ appears to be interchangeable with ‘eco’ but again with little understanding of what it actually takes to produce smart cities.

Nairobi’s satellite Konza ICT City and Ghana’s Hope City both claim to be smart cities, suggesting that they are globally connected, infrastructurally wired and operate through technological innovations. These plans completely ignore the quite obvious human and social dimensions of smart – the role of social capital and networks of trust and reciprocity that are prerequisites for innovation. In the context of urban Africa, with its often still low education levels, its predominantly poor populations, many of which as well have been uprooted or displaced as a result of urbanization and hence have fragile and probably non-place-based networks and intermittent urban power supplies, achieving both the infrastructural and human capital preconditions for smart cities will be a major challenge. Just like ‘actually existing Dholera’, the reality on the ground in Kenya and Ghana seems to be light years away from the ‘world-class’ and ‘global’ cities promised by their architects.

The puzzle then, in both India and Africa (and in the many other parts of the world where these new urban utopias have made an appearance), is why the producers of these fantasy plans have so little interest in justifying their labels of eco and smart and who they aim to convince with their unlikely claims. Rappoport’s (2014) research offers a possible answer to this question. She describes the companies that create the urban fantasy master plans as a small, elite group of international architecture, engineering and planning firms based in North America and Europe, sometimes referred to as the Global Intelligence Corps (GICs). These companies have responded to the shrinking global North markets post-recession by attempting to secure lucrative urban projects in emerging markets. Seemingly these companies regard the planning side of the business as a ‘loss-leader’ and as a precursor to securing the more lucrative commissions to design iconic buildings or infrastructure. The plans themselves, although produced by various GIC companies, are often quite similar, Rappoport (2014) argues, with a standard menu of graphics and ideas, regardless of context. They need to be quickly and cheaply developed but be sufficiently flashy to seduce politicians and investors and their labelling as sustainable or eco (or presumably smart) may be no more than part of this marketing ploy. It can well be asked how politicians are convinced that such ambitious and improbable projects could work. Whilst there is no concrete research on this to date, it may be that politicians have in mind the securing of political gains in the short-term and their promotion of such plans positions them as ‘modern’, ‘visionary’ and working towards better outcomes for all. This gains them electoral support as well as interaction with the international developer and business community – which in itself could offer a range of opportunities. By the time the outcomes and impacts of these plans become evident, politicians are likely to have moved out of office.

This argument certainly helps to explain the remarkable visual similarity of these plans across India and Africa and within Africa as well. It also helps to explain the superficiality of their claims to smartness or sustainability. Nonetheless, realization of this may come too late for the shack dwellers who are moved out of cities to make way for these visions (as has been the case in Kigale, Rwanda, where a US firm of architects produced a Dubai-like alternative for the entire city) or for farmers on land targeted for new developments, such as those on the banks of the Congo River outside Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, who are having to make way for the new Cite le Fleuve project (Watson, 2014).

There are two further ways in which Datta’s analysis of Dholera rings true for African urban fantasy plans. The first has to do with what she calls the ‘rhetoric of urgency’ (p. 5) to approve and implement these plans, captured in suggestions that urbanization is now happening more rapidly than ever before and can only be dealt with by fast-tracking these new cities and speeding up or bypassing the laws and regulations that usually slow them down. Similar calls to respond to suddenly discovered urbanization rates are to be heard in Africa, even though research (Potts, 2009) shows that these figures may be seriously inflated and that the growth of smaller and secondary cities is far more rapid than in larger cities where most of the new smart and eco projects are destined to occur. The second and related parallel is in the urge to ignore the existing planning system (in the interests of urgency) and with it any possibility of public participation. It is true that in many African countries planning systems are anyway top-down and largely undemocratic, but the new sense of urgency – to deal with urbanization, to respond to climate change and to catch up with technology – entrenches this and puts in place a whole new rationale for excluding citizen involvement.

As in India, this is resulting in the fast–slow process that Datta describes, where hastily approved graphics and plans then stall in the face of resistance by landowners or as a result of state infrastructure projects falling behind schedule. Urbanization as a ‘business model’, to use Datta’s phrase, manifests in a clash between the race for global corporate profit and the realities of the urbanization process in contexts where poverty is extensive, systems of governance are weak and often corrupt and urban infrastructure backlogs are high. The inevitable result of new political interest in these fantasy cities is that both attention and national budgets will be skewed away from the urgent needs of urban dwellers for basic sanitation, water and shelter and towards support for corporate demands, resulting in an urban landscape with far higher levels of inequality and more urban dwellers living without basic urban services (Watson, 2014).

There is one aspect of the Indian experience, which may differ from the African one, and this relates to Datta’s argument that current city building is an extension of the postcolonial modernization project of ‘new town’ building (p. 4). Many African countries also underwent an era of capital city construction in the years after independence, the intention being in most cases to construct new political and administrative capitals away from previous colonial seats of power. It is difficult, in Africa, to see the continuity between these two eras of new city construction, the earlier one inspired by a national desire to assert independent political power and the latter by global capital attempting to secure a foothold in growing economies, in alliance with local actors. Whilst global North architects, planners and engineers were involved in both rounds of city building and an aesthetics of urban modernization has commonly been the outcome, it is important to penetrate beyond the visual. The drivers of these two rounds of city building – local political/administrative and international economic – are very different and their impact in terms of who benefits, who loses and how life may change for current and future urban dwellers could be very different. As well, and following Rappoport (2014), earlier capital cities in Africa were conceived, planned and executed as total new cities; the new era of city building may only achieve this in the graphics on corporate websites, whilst final construction may be limited to a cherry-picking of the iconic buildings and some upmarket housing. This is likely to give rise to a degree of ‘splintered urbanism’ (Graham and Marvin, 2001), (referring to the ways in which the provision of networked urban infrastructural systems can spatially fragment and dislocate the social and economic functioning of cities and regions) at a scale yet unseen.