Smart futures
Temporality and speculative development in the smart city of Pune, India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17828750 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Arushi Sharan (0000-0002-7995-344X, University of Oxford, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-30 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning C Politics and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2399-6544 • E-ISSN: 2399-6552 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/23996544261447656 |
| OpenAlex | W7160313297 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 30 |
The Smart Cities Mission (SCM), an urban development programme, was launched in India in 2015, with the vision of creating 100, expertise-driven, smart cities that would be akin to ‘world cities’. A key feature of this programme is its ‘lighthouse’ approach, wherein most of the smart city projects are concentrated in a small, designated area within the city limits, to create a guiding model for future city development. Drawing from literature that argues that space is not just created geographically but co-constituted temporally, I examine the case of the Pune smart city in western India using a combination of fieldwork data and documentary analysis. I argue that through its ‘lighthouse’ approach, the SCM creates what I call ‘time enclaves’ within geographically contiguous spaces, spatialising time in a way that disassociates the selected areas from the rest of the city. These enclaves operate in a future time, ‘ahead’ of the rest of the city, representing progress and wealth that is always imminent, but never reachable. Operating in a future with an undefined (and therefore unlimited) potential for prosperity, time enclaves are lucrative zones, facilitating speculation for profit. In Pune, the material manifestation of this vision, mediated through the present, has resulted in the appropriation of the smart city tag by local real estate developers and political elites for their own gain. Thus, unravelling the garb of futurism of smart city reveals another dimension of the workings of ‘the anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson, 1994) and its consequences for widening urban inequalities and development
Appropriation · Dimension (graph theory) · Politics · Real estate · Rest (music) · Smart city · Space (punctuation) · Temporality · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis · Smart Cities and Technologies · Urban Planning and Governance
The High-Rise and the slum
New State Spaces
The State of Exception
Smart city place-based outcomes in India
What Makes Indian Cities Smart? A Policy Analysis of Smart Cities Mission
From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism
Homo Sacer
Making sense of smart cities
India’s “smart” cities mission
Governing India’s Land
Real estate politicians in India
Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977)
Colonial archives and the arts of governance
Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Governance
Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities
Smart cities as corporate storytelling
Elite discourse coalitions and the governance of 'smart spaces
Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City
Postcolonial urban futures
Recombinant Urbanization
From Neoliberalism to Neoliberalisation
Unleashing speculative urbanism
Santu Mofokeng, Photographs
The Extended Case Method
Neoliberalism as concept
The men in the middle
| Highly cited | No |
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