The smart city project: sustainable city utopia or dystopian nightmare?
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Abstract
This article critically examines the discourse of the smart city as a contemporary urban utopia that promises sustainability, inclusion, and technological efficiency. Drawing on a political and sociological analysis, it traces the historical and conceptual genealogy of the smart city, from its technocratic roots in cybernetics to its neoliberal appropriation by global technology corporations. The paper explore how the ideal of “smartness” reshapes urban governance through mechanisms of data extraction, surveillance, and algorithmic control, revealing the tensions between transparency and domination in digital urbanism. The case of India’s Smart Cities Mission is analyzed to illustrate how the rhetoric of participation and innovation often conceals processes of exclusion, spatial fragmentation, and social inequality. By integrating recent empirical studies on data-driven governance and surveil-lance capitalism, the article argues that the smart city functions less as a neutral model of sustainable development and more as a field where power, technology, and inequality intersect.
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