Smart futures: Temporality and speculative development in the smart city of Pune,India

Introducing the Smart Cities Mission

The Smart Cities Mission (SCM), an urban development programme, was launched in India in 2015 with the vision of creating 100 smart cities that would be akin to ‘world cities.’ Typically, a smart city refers to a city that utilises information and communication technologies for improved governance and development of the city. The contemporary push towards smart cities started from the late 2000s with technology giants such as IBM and Cisco using the smart discourse to push their products such as smart water meters, cloud-backed surveillance cameras and environment sensors, and public Wi-Fi units (Greenfield, 2013; Söderström et al., 2014). ‘Smartness’ is projected as a depoliticised, data-driven, and expertise-backed approach to urban planning and development to create materially prosperous cities of the future. Cities compete to be selected as one of the 100 smart cities participating in the SCM.

The genesis of this programme is not an isolated phenomenon, but is intrinsic to the social, political, and economic changes that have taken place in recent times. The push towards it lies in urban entrepreneurialism of states, in which they act as active facilitators of capitalist development, seeking to brand and transform cities and urban governance to attract capital (Banerjee-Guha, 2009; Brenner, 2004; Guptoo, 2015; Harvey, 1989). While smart city in other urban contexts is typically about digitalisation, in India the idea of a smart city includes everything from infrastructure development, urban housing, e-governance, sanitation, and inclusive and sustainable development. This has led scholars to argue that there is no clarity or consensus over what is meant by a smart city and that in promising everything the smart city offers nothing at all (Prasad et al., 2022; Prasad and Alizadeh, 2020; Smith et al., 2019; Taraporevala, 2018). In this paper, while I use the terms ‘smart city’ and ‘smartness’ throughout, I am not using them in the prevalent sense, as referring to the efficiency brought through digital technologies and the expertise associated with it. Instead, I use them in a dual sense: both as referring to specific ideas and programme of action, but also relatedly, as hollow signifiers of anything and everything that smart(ness) promises.

In this paper, I adopt a case study method to study the SCM’s workings, and do so by studying the smart city of Pune in western India. The SCM’s implementation across the country relies on the pluralisation of governance and networking of the state (Chandhoke, 2003; Jayal, 1999). The urban entrepreneurial logic embedded in the SCM is reflected in its ‘start-up’ model whereby SCM projects are executed by a separate Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), and not the city’s elected municipal body (Pandey, 2022). This SPV is a company, with the sub-national government and urban local body (ULB) being its promoters, holding 50:50 equity. ULBs delegate decision-making powers that they would otherwise have to this SPV (Housing and Land Rights Network, 2017). The SPV, envisioned as a start-up, receives initial ‘seed funding’ through grants from across the three tiers of federal government in India—local, state or regional, and national. The SPV is expected to raise further finances through municipal bonds, loans from agencies like the Asian Development Bank and World Bank, and generate its own revenue stream (MoUD, 2015). SPVs also work with global management consulting firms in their operation. Two such firms—McKinsey & Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)—were heavily involved in drafting and implementing smart city projects in Pune.

The corporation form of this entity, the clear distancing from politically elected municipal leaders, and the collaboration with experts in the form of consultants also constructs urban development issues as merely technical problems that can be solved through market-driven solutions. To draw from James Ferguson (1994), through the presumed anti-politics of a technocratic approach, the guise of development takes on a benign and apolitical role. Finally, a key component of the SCM, one which this paper analyses, is area-based development. In every smart city selected, a “compact area” is chosen where a majority of the SCM projects are concentrated. This is done to create ‘lighthouses’, i.e., guiding models for development that can be replicated in other parts of the city, or other cities (MoUD, 2015: p. 5). These lighthouses are presented as an abstract and clinical form of city development, evident in their references to being ‘test labs’ or ‘living labs’ that are experimenting with innovative solutions (MoUD, 2015: p. 5; UN Habitat and MoHUA, GoI, 2023, p. xxvi).

This programme is one of the largest urban development programmes in India, with a total budgetary outlay of roughly 24,416 million USD nationally. However, despite massive spending and ambitious plans, the ground-level story of these smart cities has been very different. I study the implementation of this programme, particularly in the city of Pune, analysing how the SCM spatialises time and to what consequences. Using evidence and insights generated inductively from my fieldwork, I argue that the SCM promotes the creation of certain spatio-temporal zones within the city, which I refer to as ‘time enclaves’. These zones, while geographically contiguous with other parts of the city, are envisioned as operating in a future time. While a great deal of urban planning and development is done keeping the future in mind, to accommodate potential economic and population growth, what is distinctive about the smart city is that it inhabits a future time from the get-go. Smart cities are set at a point in the future that has not yet arrived, serving as an ideal cover to circumvent any critique directed towards their workings. The depoliticised idea of a smart city makes it possible to dis-embed it from the material realities of the present.

This paper also explores how the Pune SCM has facilitated speculative real estate development through the creation of ‘time enclaves’. In the following sections, I explore and analyse how this has occurred, also looking at the local politician-builder nexus in the city in the process. I close by briefly examining how the SCM has altered the spatio-temporal order between the ‘old city’ and the ‘smart city’ in Pune. Here, ‘old city’ refers to areas that are more centrally located in the city’s geography and have been a part of Pune historically, whereas ‘smart city’ refers to the areas located on the fringes of the city, chosen for area-based development under the SCM.

Before proceeding further, some clarifications on terminologies used: ‘state’ refers to the nexus of relations between governmental institutions and political institutions that can be empirically observed and studied (Abrams, 1988). ‘Capital’ refers to those resources (both tangible and intangible) that can be used for further investment, instead of immediate consumption, to enhance productive capacities in a way that can generate even more resources for distribution and consumption. In this paper, ‘speculative development' refers to an ongoing process in urbanisation wherein the production of built environments prioritises conjectures pertaining to the future over existing needs. This process is closely tied to transformations in land valuation which treat land as a tradable asset and vehicle for investment rather than an element of functional habitation (Echanove and Srivastava, 2012; Goldman, 2011; Leitner and Sheppard, 2023; Searle, 2010). ‘Time’ is, conceptualised as an ‘ordering of events’—far from being a unified and linear entity, time is networked and exists in relation to other entities that it interacts with (Rovelli, 2019). ‘Past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’ are relational; notions of ‘there and then’ are contingent on a ‘here and now’.

The SCM and speculative development in Pune

ABB [Aundh, Baner, Balewadi] is a classic case of how real estate development happened under the name of smart city. Aundh was the cover page, but Baner and Balewadi were the meat of the thing. They had the highest number of land parcels to be developed. There were real estate decisions and interests involved in the selection of these areas. Half of the city developers are involved with politicians, hand-in-glove with the bureaucrats too… Before the smart city development was started, real estate rates went up. The developers got a bargain in the whole deal. It [smart city] was a conscious decision to serve a certain industry. Since then, carpet area of properties has increased manifold, and real estate prices in that area have doubled. Landowners and developers have also benefitted. Local politics has played a role too. Most politicians are builders too, and bureaucrats are involved with them too.

The above quote is from an active civil society member in Pune—Rakesh. He had been involved in the SCM in its initial phases of implementation, being a member of a citizens’ group representing Baner, one of the three areas chosen for area-based development under the SCM. Right at the beginning of our interaction, he added the caveat that he considers himself a ‘socially active citizen’, and his views are coloured by that position. While my initial fieldwork observations had made it apparent that Baner and Balewadi had experienced few changes by way of the SCM, and instead had become areas of rampant real-estate development, my conversation with Rakesh was the first one that brought to light the hard contours of this aspect of smart city generated development in Pune. From the selection of these areas under the SCM, to their actual development, there seems to be an eye towards real estate development under the garb of smartness. The suggestion here is not that Baner and Balewadi’s rampant development was entirely pre-meditated. Rather, a curious mix of the vision and design of the SCM, with the politician-builder nexus in Pune and the associated political economy produced the outcomes I witnessed.

Despite the non-implementation of several envisioned SCM projects in the city, the tag of smart city has furthered speculative real estate development in Baner and Balewadi. These zones are seen as ‘time enclaves’—as realms of future prosperity, future opportunity, and futuristic living. As Rakesh astutely analysed in the quote I opened with, Aundh served as a ‘cover page’: it was an area that had largely been developed ¹ previously. Aundh constituted an outer limit of Pune in the 1970s and 1980s and served as an entry/exit point to the highway connecting the city with the financial capital of the country, Mumbai. The adjoining areas of Baner and Balewadi were village areas that were included in the municipal limits of Pune in the late 1990s. These areas were also included in Pune’s city limits once the geographically proximate area of Hinjewadi saw the growth of the IT industry in the 1990s. Several plots of land were acquired by builders, some of which were handed over to the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) to develop ‘amenity spaces’ for the public in these areas. The farmers cultivating this land were paid to vacate it, creating the presumed sterile ‘test labs’ on which smart city projects were to be executed (interviews with Niharika, former corporator, Balewadi, 3/2/2023; Pramod, academic, 19/10/2022; Reetika, journalist, 9/9/2022; Tejashree, journalist, 14/12/2022; Vinayak, resident, 7/12/2022).

These three areas were identified beforehand, with my field data indicating that this was done largely by bureaucrats and consultants (interviews with Naresh, local politician and activist, 24/11/2023; Pradeep, politician, 20/2/2023; Radhika, civil society activist, 22/11/2022; Sushant, former corporator, Aundh, 30/1/2023). From the 2000s, up until 2015 when the SCM was started, several plots of land remained ‘empty’ in Baner and Balewadi, having been acquired by the PMC or by real estate developers. But since the SCM began, real estate development increased exponentially in these areas. See Figure 2 for instance, which captures this through Google Earth’s archives. While many fringe areas of Pune have experienced real estate development in the last couple of decades as a result of the ongoing agrarian to urban transition, Baner and Balewadi have experienced this at a much faster pace relative to other fringe areas. Baner in particular has repeatedly recorded some of the highest real estate sales in the last few years, in both commercial and residential sectors, in the entirety of Pune (Knight Frank, 2017, 2023).OPEN IN VIEWER

But what has enabled these areas to become such hotspots for speculative real estate development? In the next sub-section, I explore how the ‘lighthouse’ approach has facilitated this.

Creating ‘time enclaves’: The ‘lighthouse’ approach of the SCM

The Smart Cities initiative is like a test lab where in 3-4% of the area of the city, initiatives like placemaking, Adaptive Traffic Management System (ATMS) are developed. The ULB works hand in hand with the SPV to identify places for replication. The smart cities projects are lighthouse projects to guide other cities and areas for their development.

The lighthouse approach is a unique feature of the SCM—it combines notions of the entrepreneurial city with that of zones of exception, like Special Economic Zones (SEZs). While inter-related, these notions are distinct. The entrepreneurial city agenda aims to create a ‘good business climate’ and tasks city administrators with it, through the design of policies and programmes that are speculative in nature and can attract capital (Harvey, 1989; Jessop, 2002). The idea of a ‘zone of exception’ as applied spatially, comes significantly from Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 2005) work in which he argues that a state of exception is not a mere temporary state of suspension of law, rather a feature of the structure of governance of modern states. He argues that where this state of exception exists, individuals are excluded from normal legal order and exist in a dis-embedded state between law and lawlessness, stripped of citizenship rights, such as in refugee camps. Scholars like Ananya Roy (2009) and Aihwa Ong (2006) have applied this concept to peri-urban fringes, industrial corridors, and SEZs to discuss how these zones are created through dispossession to facilitate capital’s expansion. Thus, zones of exception also aim to create sites that are lucrative for capital’s expansion and provide a territorial fix to it, but unlike existing city-spaces, they are usually free from ordinary forms of governmental regulation (Slobodian, 2023).

The area-based approach of the SCM combines elements of the two in its vision—by selecting certain sites within the city-space it aims to create a ‘zone of exception’, separate from the rest of the city, but retaining an entrepreneurial, speculative character. It is important to underscore here that this is the vision of the lighthouse approach of the SCM, not necessarily its precise manifestation in execution. But coming back to these lighthouses, how does one create a zone of exception within an existing, geographic city-space? By moving it on to a different temporal space.

The exceptionality of the areas selected under the SCM’s area-based development does not lie in the fact that they are governed by a different set of regulations, although there is another governing body for them in conjunction with the local corporation: the SPV. However, the SPV has no legislative functions and merely manages the formulation and execution of SCM projects—smart city areas are still subject to the same laws and regulations as other city areas and representatives from these areas are also elected to the PMC (Taraporevala, 2024). Lighthouse areas’ exceptionality lies in temporal exceptionalism—in having been envisioned to occupy a future time perpetually. The experimental and innovative quality of SCM projects being implemented in these sites that can ‘guide’ other cities in the future positions them at a point in temporal space that is ‘ahead’ of the rest of the city. The reference to the ‘test lab’ that the Chief Knowledge Officer makes in the quote above reflects that.

There is one key element that characterises the idea of a lighthouse in this programme—replicability. It is intended to work as an exemplar, because it is experimenting with futurity in the present—in doing so it is working as a bridge between ideas and projects that belong to a prosperous world city of the future, and the under-developed city of the present, encumbered by the history of India’s exploitative colonial past which fostered the underdevelopment. To illustrate this further, I provide an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Varun, a senior PwC consultant working on SCM projects in several smart cities across India:

Author: Why do you think something like the SCM was started when other urban development programmes like AMRUT were also in place?

Varun attributes the uniqueness of the SCM to its area-based approach, which seeks to create models to provide a demonstration effect: the government wanted to ‘show’ that it can be done, that the ideal-type can be put into practice. There is a fundamental dissonance that this statement and the concept of lighthouses carries, one that extends beyond the issue of semantics.

‘Ideal types’ by their very definition exist in the realm of thought and abstraction. Practice, on the other hand, is unsanitised, and embroiled in the pulls, pressures, and mutability of material realities. Ideal types, when brought into the fold of practice, inevitably lose their pristine quality. Similarly, a future time existing in the present does so by being embroiled in the latter. This may be a seemingly obvious, innocuous, and intuitive awareness that everyone carries. However, in holding up these area-based development projects as ideal types that are produced in sterile lab-like conditions, what is missed are the relations of power that sustain these constructs. What is erased, why, where, and how, and which ‘futures’ are pursued and experimented with are politically driven decisions. As Pradeep, a local politician in Aundh said when asked about the selection of ABB as lighthouses,

There was a city survey conducted based on the Central government’s guidelines and the criteria they had set. ABB were selected according to that. The criteria were that the selected area should have a slum in it, should be a developing area, should be place where there is open land, which is easy to develop – Interview with Pradeep, politician, 20/2/2023.

The decision to include a slum area, as the case of Pune shows, was evidently a tokenistic inclusion driven by pressures of democratic politics to extend beyond the elite-centric nature of the SCM, for years later, the slum area has not been redeveloped (Kulkarni, 2023; Shaikh, 2022). Further, the emphasis on choosing sites that are ‘open areas’ and ‘developing areas’ exhibits a speculative development drive.

The futurity of the smart city moves it to a different temporal space, converting geographically proximate spaces into distant ones. Thus, the SCM explicitly shows that the depoliticisation of urban development, which occurs through the creation of a presumed tabula rasa (Basu, 2019; Kennedy and Sood, 2016), is mediated through temporalities. In erasing the pasts of these spaces in pursuit of creating a blank slate, the present is sought to be bypassed as well, so as to create an exceptional space that exists in the realm of futurity and associated possibilities.

This creates even more space for capital’s expansion. Through practices and processes of speculative urbanisation, capital is not just seeking a ‘fix’ for its expansion in geographic space (Harvey, 2001), it is also seeking a fix in temporal space. Take, for instance, Varun’s statement quoted above, “If people start liking it, then funding can be secured for all other areas of the city, and even other cities”. In the case of the SCM, “it” would be the products of technology multi-nationals like the cloud-backed CCTV cameras and sensors that every city in this programme tried to include. This reiterates the entrepreneurial character of the SCM, but also highlights that the state is not simply aiming to create a ‘good business climate’ to facilitate capital’s expansion through this programme but actively aiming to generate ‘demand’ for the business. While so far, neoliberal policy agendas and concomitant structural changes in the Indian economy have made businesses co-producers in public policy (Mathur, 2014), the SCM highlights how the state perhaps seeks to become a co-participant in enterprise, displaying the ongoing restructuring of the contemporary state in India. .

This is further exemplified in the growth of politicians who are hand-in-glove with real estate developers or own real estate businesses themselves. The nexus between real estate developers and politicians has developed most prominently after economic liberalisation in India in 1991, with land becoming monetised through changes in government regulation that liberalised land markets and transformed land into a tradable real estate asset (Balakrishnan and Pani, 2021; Sami, 2012; Shatkin, 2017).

Liberalisation also created a fertile ground for speculative real estate ventures. Small-scale manufacturing firms and even state enterprises began monetising their land assets rather than focusing on production. This trend led to the displacement of industrial activity in favour of high-value real estate developments, such as gated communities and commercial hubs (Balakrishnan, 2019). As Searle (2010) argues, real estate relies on speculation for profit, which is supported through the creation of alternate futures. These imaginaries of an alternate future are characterised by uncertainty as they are premised on conjectures. In imagining another future, they represent a “negation of existing conditions” by rejecting and seeking to reform the very societies that they emerge from (Holston, 1989, as cited in Parikh, 2015). Therefore, speculative real estate development is an endeavour that produces a certain kind of temporal space, for the expansion and accumulation of capital.

So far, in this paper I have discussed the lighthouse or area-based development component of the SCM. In the next section I discuss the material consequences of the lighthouse, as evidenced in Pune.

Lighthouses: Zones of speculation and real estate development in Pune

Author: A common thing I have heard from citizens is that they want smart city developments in their areas as well. They are unhappy that the projects have only been restricted to the ABB area.

It is undoubtable that the SCM has accelerated real estate development in Baner and Balewadi through the tag of smart city, which ear-marked these areas as prominent and upcoming ones. Figure 3, a billboard advertisement of an upcoming commercial complex in Baner, and Pratap’s quote above, reflect the rampant real estate development underway in these areas.OPEN IN VIEWER

According to the multi-national real estate consultancy Knight Frank, in 2017, the west Pune ‘micro-market’ which comprises ABB and the adjoining Hinjewadi and Pashan areas, was the most lucrative in the entire city for setting up office spaces (Knight Frank, 2017). Knight Frank publishes its ‘India Real Estate’ report each year, and year-on-year, west Pune has emerged as the top contender for real estate investments. In fact, in the first quarter of 2024, Pune witnessed a 56% rise in sales value of residential real estate from the previous year to approximately 1.98 billion USD, and a breakdown of sales in specific locations in the city showed that Baner recorded the highest number of residential real estate sales worth roughly 97.6 million USD (Punekar News, 2024).

The SCM has promoted bubble urbanism in Pune and produced fragmented urban landscapes through its area-based approach (Prasad et al., 2022). The gains intended to be generated through the creation of these ‘time enclaves’ rely on their exclusionary nature and temporal distance. Evidently, the speculative real estate development spurred on in these enclaves is also intended for the middle-class consumer-citizen, and not for the working classes or the nearly 30% of Pune’s residential population that lives in informal settlements (Punekar News, 2022; interview with Sahil, journalist, 10/11/2022).

On a walk with an architect in the Pune SCM, Dilip, along the prominent ‘pilot road’ of the SCM in Aundh, he expressed how it was his dream to buy a shop in the commercial areas that flank both sides of the road, but that his dream will now remain unrealised because of how much property prices have appreciated after the construction of this smart road (see Figure 4; interview with Dilip, architect, Pune, 25/3/2023). The commercial value has accelerated in the areas alongside this road, and now shop owners are able to sell or lease their property in the area at double than what the cost was before the SCM.OPEN IN VIEWER

According to Dilip, the cost of developing this 1 km stretch of pilot road was roughly 1.6 million USD, and the cost of refurbishing that road now would not be less than 700,000 USD (interview with Dilip, architect, 25/3/2023). The PMC has also benefitted monetarily from the escalating commercial value brought by the smart road’s development. The smart city hype has fuelled the development of more offices, residential buildings, and marketplaces in and around the area. As a result, the PMC’s income has increased through the revenue it receives from building construction charges and property taxes (interview with Revati, Chief Finance Officer, Pune SPV and Chief Accounts and Finance Officer, PMC, 12/9/2022).

The SCM’s implementation in the city has been shaped by a power tussle between the PMC and the Pune SPV. While the PMC handed over land to the Pune SPV to formulate and execute smart city projects, it is not obliged to share any revenue generated from the development of the projects with the SPV, as the municipal corporation is the constitutionally mandated body for governing the city, not the SPV. Moreover, the PMC frequently dismisses the smart city projects as not falling in its turf. This brings us to another facet that has shaped the real estate development in Aundh, Baner, and Balewadi, which is the nexus between local politicians and builders.

Spatio-temporal order of relations between the old city and smart city

While the threads of the past and the present run through the making of these futuristic time enclaves, it is undeniable that the SCM is altering the spatio-temporal relations of Pune’s city-space, such that existing inequalities in the city are being exacerbated. In her analysis of the spatial temporality in the smart city of Shimla, Ayona Datta (2024) finds that the SCM spatialises time in a way that reproduces marginality between the smart city areas and other parts of the city. Similarly, in Pune, the lighthouse approach of the SCM is geared towards increasing the temporal distance between the smart city and the old city, in a way that keeps the latter in a marginal position.

In an interview with an engineer at the Pune SPV, I had asked why smart roads were not made in the older parts of the city. To this, he had replied,

Purane city mein nahi ho sakta. [It cannot be done in the old city.] There the road area is only 18 m in total. It would be very difficult to create wide footpaths and lay down all the necessary infrastructure underneath that.

While Pratap’s response was from a purely technical point of view as someone executing the SCM project, this technicality is also built upon certain assumptions. Recall that Aundh’s smart road was also built by deploying some degree of coercion. It was not the case that a ready-made open tract of land was available for its creation. But as a lighthouse area, Aundh was chosen to be a space of futurism and aspiration, and therefore, these projects were to be implemented there. In bringing Aundh’s smart future to the present, an alignment of political and economic interests amongst powerful stakeholders played a role, shaping the material manifestation of this envisioned time enclave. But the old city is assumed to be too old for smartness.

The temporal distance between the smart city and the old city is far wider than their geographic distance, and with the SCM, the temporal order between the two has been inverted. Baner and Balewadi were once agricultural areas, existing on the outskirts of Pune. In 1994, Pune’s largest sports stadium was built on Balewadi’s soil, somewhat developing the area as a road was built, passing through Baner, to connect it to the core of the city. With the establishment of an IT park in Hinjewadi, these two adjoining areas acquired greater significance and were included within the municipal limits. Even in the early 2000s, these areas, along with Aundh, remained as fringe areas to the core city. Baner and Balewadi, especially, were considered undeveloped, semi-rural, and therefore ‘behind’ the rest of the city. While the value of these areas increased with the growth of the neighbouring IT industry through the 2000s, the SCM was what sealed the deal.

Baner is now a real estate hotspot and represents a future moment of urbanisation, rather than its agrarian past. Figure 5 depicts a photograph of a billboard in Baner with an advertisement of an upcoming real estate project called Baner NX, with a slogan saying “The Future is Baner NX. Decoding Soon…” The imagery behind is that of the skyline of a megacity, with orange-yellow light beaming through the gaps between skyscrapers, as though the sun is rising and a new day is beginning, ushering in a global city life and all its associated possibilities. The words ‘Decoding Soon’ are geared towards marketing the project to its intended audience, the IT professionals who work nearby, but perhaps also seek to signal the eminence of this class of professionals in the city, in its polity and economy—smart citizens of a smart city.OPEN IN VIEWER

Similarly, Balewadi has witnessed substantial commercial development, alongside real estate development. ‘Balewadi High Street’, inspired by UK-style high streets which are often the primary market streets of a town or city, has developed in the area in the past few years. The High Street is glitzy, and comprises of high-end supermarkets, restaurants, and several notable international retail brands, and is always abuzz with young people, often seen live-streaming or taking selfies. Offices of technology firm Siemens and other multinationals such as Cummins exist are located behind this street.

From being areas that were considered ‘undeveloped’ and lacking in infrastructure, Baner and Balewadi have become areas that symbolically (if not entirely tangibly) represent the future, with modern city lifestyles, and wealth. In the spatio-temporal order of Pune, the smart city areas’ relationship with the core city is changing.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have discussed a unique aspect of the SCM in India, which is its area-based development approach. This approach seeks to create exceptional zones within the city-space, wherein their exceptionality lies in the occupation of a different temporal space than that of the rest of the city. Smart cities are always set in an unreachable future, one that the rest of the city, or other cities, have not quite caught up to yet.

An exploration and analysis of the smart city’s futurism reveals another dimension of the depoliticisation of urban development. The temporal distance created in the form of this ‘lighthouse’ and the scientific, expertise-driven experimentation happening in these ‘test labs’ are strategies for creating more space for capital. Through the smart city, capital is seeking a fix in temporal space, alongside the co-constituted geographic space. If a spatio-temporal zone always exists beyond the possibility of reach, then there are ever-more possibilities of speculation-driven profit-making.

However, the local political economy of the present is what shapes the smart city’s material manifestation. While the national scale of the state imagines this futuristic smart city through the legacies of the postcolonial developmental Indian state of the past, in a bid to overcome historic underdevelopment, local actors in the city imagine the smart city’s future from the present. For local politicians and builders, the future-inhabiting smart city is imagined through present-day political and economic calculations. There exists a nexus between real estate developers and politicians in the city, with several politicians owning real estate businesses themselves. The income generated through real estate finances expensive political careers, either the individual ones of politicians or the political party that they belong to. In turn, their political positions help in undercutting regulation to generate profit for the business. Thus, in Pune, the tag of smart city has facilitated speculative real estate development, the actual success of SCM projects notwithstanding.

The “actually existing” smart city, as Rob Kitchin (2015, p. 134) called for to be examined, exists in cross-cutting spatio-temporalities, and is defined through their interconnections and variance. In this paper, I explored and analysed some of these sites of intersection. I argued that the SCM is altering the spatio-temporal order between the ‘old city’ and the ‘smart city’, and inverting the relationship that previously existed wherein the lighthouse areas that are now envisioned to occupy a future time were formerly considered to be steeped in the past and ‘undeveloped’. The old city, on the other hand, is deemed to be too far behind for the experimentation and innovation involved in becoming smart. This is a dynamic and contested process, and is by no means a solidified equation. Smart city as a concept carries an inherent temporal tension, which is reflected in the complex and often contradictory material development of Baner and Balewadi in Pune, India.