Smart City Control Rooms
The Rewiring of Local Governance Landscapes in India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11947762 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Devika Prakash (0000-0002-9319-8364, corresponding author), Andy Karvonen (0000-0002-0688-9547), J Metzger (0000-0002-0693-5355) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0309-1317 • E-ISSN: 1468-2427 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1468-2427.70025 |
| OpenAlex | W4414216775 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 53 |
Smart city control rooms are prominent components of the smart city discourse. They embody a long‐standing dream to visualize and manage multiple urban processes in real time through the collation of data flows. Previous research has produced important insights into the design, construction and operation of these facilities. However, this research has largely overlooked the fundamental changes to political and institutional conditions of the city that take place through the implementation of smart city control rooms. In this article, we examine how smart city control rooms are reconfiguring local governance landscapes in India through an in‐depth case study of the city of Kochi. We apply the notion of the urban governance dispositif to Kochi's control room in the making to characterize how the facility is co‐created alongside a rewiring of the institutions, infrastructures and imaginaries of urban local governance in the city. We demonstrate how, in this process, the smart city control room extends central government control and strengthens central and state government collaboration in urban local governance while legitimizing ICT companies as key actors of urban development. This study illustrates how smart city projects—even when technically stumbling—generate fundamental long‐term implications to how cities are understood and managed
Control (management · Corporate governance · Government (linguistics · Local government · Politics · Smart city · Urban planning · COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis · Smart Cities and Technologies
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Digital Infrastructures and Urban Governance
Fractured smart cities
Strategies of visibility in the smart city
‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’
Smart urbanism and smart citizenship
Smarter than Smart
The spectrum of control
Governing the smart city
Urban governance dispositifs
Analysing multilevel governance dynamics in India
Rescaling urban governance
Glitch epistemologies for computational cities
Big data, smart cities and city planning
Smart cities
Seeing into the entropic state
Towards a critique of cybernetic urbanism
Foucault's Dispositif and the City
Assemblage and critical urbanism
Bringing back the national to the study of globally circulating policy ideas
The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism
Competition, contingency, and destabilization in urban assemblages and actor-networks
Mobilizing heterogeneity
The governance of smart cities
Intrusiveness of urban renewal in India
Tightly Bound, Loosely Interpreted
(Re)defining the smart city at national level? Coexisting narratives of urban sustainability governance in Germany
Spaces of visibility in the smart city
Multiscalar Smart City Governance in India
From sustainable to smart
Using thematic analysis in psychology
Programming Environments
The digital turn in postcolonial urbanism
Assemblage thinking as methodology
Smart cities as corporate storytelling
Discerning institutional and spatial restructuring under emergent neoliberal projects in India
Elite discourse coalitions and the governance of 'smart spaces
Studying Obduracy in the City
Algorhythmic governance
Michel Foucault and the Smart City
A New Urban Dispositif? Governing Life in an Age of Climate Change
The maintenance of urban circulation
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Making a smart city for the smart grid? The urban material politics of actualising smart electricity networks
"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
Practices of assemblage and community forest management
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |