The right to the smart city in the Global South: A research agenda

Abstract

Urban research has increasingly embraced the Global South, as recent critical scholarship continues opening to Southern cities, scholars and ideas generated from the South. Here, we (the authors, two women of the Global South) think strategically about ‘the Southern urban critique’, ‘the right to the city’ and ‘smart cities’– as well as some limitations of doing so. Intrigued by the fast pace of smart city development across the Global South, and informed by the ongoing critical debates and increasing empirical work focused on the unfolding of ‘smart’ in the Southern cities, we put forward a research agenda ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’. Through three lenses of expose, propose and politicise this research agenda articulates the smart city shortcomings from a Southern critical perspective to elevate the ongoing empirical studies on the subject, to shed light on the gaps in knowledge, and to produce a normative alternative vision for ‘just smart city’. Our challenge to readers is to help create such smart cities, to engage with and reflect on the arguments in this positioning piece, and then complement them with further normative, future-oriented work – informed by empirical knowledge – to fully map out the particularities of an alternative Southern smart city, to inform planning and policymaking for just smart cities, and to enact the right to the smart city in the Global South.

Introduction

In recent decades urban research has come a long way in terms of embracing the Global South, as the numbers of research articles focused on Southern cities published in high-ranking urban studies journals continue to rise (Lawhon and Le Roux, 2019; Robinson and Roy, 2016; Sheppard et al., 2013). Nevertheless, most of these articles are still written by white scholars born, raised and working in the Global North. Most continue to work within rather than challenge the North-dominated urban discourse and the colonial lens behind it. This is despite the unprecedented contemporary rate of urbanisation in the Global South (Marshall, 2003), which is home to the majority of the world’s population.

Hence, our collective work as urban researchers is far from complete. We write this positioning piece as two non-white women of the Global South, born, raised, educated and having worked in the Southern cities as built environment professionals in various roles. We, however, acknowledge our collective 25-plus years of living, studying and working on unceded lands of the First Nations people in Australia – one of the few major countries located in the southern hemisphere and yet categorised in the Global North. Academic life in Australia has provided us with ongoing opportunities to conduct empirical urban research in numerous Southern cities and to think and write (Alizadeh, 2021; Prasad et al., 2021, 2022) about the implications well beyond to inform contemporary urban studies. Here, we bring our collective lived and academic/professional experiences from around the world, hoping for a future in which binary terms such as Global South versus Global North or smart versus ordinary are needed less. We strive to create and contribute to an urban discourse that is rigorously mindful of the ongoing significance of the politics and geographies of knowledge production and distribution.

In this article, however, we build on a widely acknowledged concern (Edensor and Jayne, 2012; Lawhon and Le Roux, 2019) that – despite the increasing rate of empirical research in the Global South cities – the urban theory is dominated by the Northern cities and scholars. The steady stream of South-informed urban framings – such as instant cities (Wright, 2008), ordinary cities (Robinson, 2008), shadow cities (Neuwirth, 2006), invisible cities (De Boeck and Plissart, 2014), subaltern urbanism (Roy, 2011), pirate towns (Simone, 2005), postcolonial urbanism (Bishop et al., 2003) and so forth – reflects a growing unease with the state of urban theory. There are strong arguments (Parnell and Oldfield, 2016; Samara et al., 2013; Sheppard et al., 2013) for a distinct field of enquiry, ‘Southern urbanism’, in response to the limitations of Northern theory (Lemanski, 2019). More recently, Lawhon and Truelove (2020) suggest that ‘the Southern urban critique’ is more powerful as an insistent reminder of the politics of knowledge. The South, then, is not a location but a power relation that has long been used to silence and sideline (Roy, 2014, 2019; Spivak, 2004). In a sense, we find this broad notion of South useful as it acknowledges the colonial ideas (Lawhon et al., 2020; Porter, 2016) shaping the contemporary urban discourse everywhere; and the provocation that emerges from thinking about Sydney or Los Angeles as postcolonial cities with a hidden (understudied) Southern side. ‘The Southern urban critique’ boldly calls to rework all urban theory, but it would be rather troubling if its conceptual power was primarily bent back Northwards, used to (re)understand mainly Northern spaces. This is a concern as we strongly believe that more research focused on the cities in the South is needed to attend to historical imbalances and oversights in urban studies – as Southern cities have been understudied for a long time. Therefore, we retain the term ‘Global South’, throughout this article, in search of a Southern research agenda, yet acknowledge the limitations of an imperfect North–South binary (Lawhon and Le Roux, 2019). We argue that what is learned from the Global South cities – from a ‘Southern urban critique’ perspective – is not limited to their specific geographies and has the transnational potential to inform alternative analytical frameworks in urban studies with a focus on power relations for the benefits of all those sidelined in any context.

More specifically, we acknowledge the fast pace of smart city planning and practices across the Global South (Alizadeh, 2021), pushed by a combination of motivated national governments and pioneering international corporations. The ambitious smart city plans in different corners of the Global South – including but not limited to India, China, Africa and South America – have been partially captured in the critical smart urbanism literature (Datta, 2019; Odendaal, 2018; Prasad and Alizadeh, 2020; Willis, 2019). This fast-growing line of case study research articulates the need for provincialised understandings of smart cities (Miller et al., 2021), as it demonstrates that Southern cities are vastly different in their smart city efforts from the models and stereotypes of the Global North smart cities, with substantial variation within the Global South. We argue that provincialised understanding of smart cities needs to stretch beyond case study research, as a Southern theoretical frame is required to truly capture a more-than-Global-North smart city research agenda.

This is not to dismiss the contextual differences in the smart city policy, planning and implementation across the Global South. Our endeavour to articulate a theoretical framework for Southern smart cities is informed by Comaroff and Comaroff (2013) calling out the hypocrisy in theory development, arguing that Southern knowledge has been dismissed as parochial wisdom – due to the contextual empirical differences, among other reasons – while Northern knowledge is assumed universal. In light of this argument, we aspire for a theoretical framework of Southern smart cities informed by the contextual differences across the South. For us, such a framework has to be integrated with and built on the critical Southern urbanism research and its focus on shining light on the conflicts and struggles for justice in the face of the increasing social polarisation and spatial division in Southern cities (Patel, 2014; Samara et al., 2013).

This article brings together multiple voices from across the South and the North to offer a theoretical framework for ‘just smart cities of the Global South’. This theory-building exercise is informed by empirical learning from the Southern smart cities; and yet, it has the capacity to elevate the empirical understanding of Southern smart cities to a level that – despite the contextual differences – informs the broader pursuit of just cities across the Global South and beyond. After all, the trends observed in the South are not divorced from the realities of the cities in the North. However, the excessive intensity of Southern urbanism (more on this follows), makes an excellent base for theory development, the kind of theory that informs and uplifts urban studies to inform cities everywhere in their pursuit of justice.

In search of a theory for ‘just smart cities of the Global South’, this article starts by unpacking a range of frameworks such as ‘the right to the city’, ‘the right to the city in the Global South’ and ‘the right to the smart city’. In doing so, we are aware that ‘the right to the city’ framework originated in the Global North; and yet, we follow the footprints of numerous Global South researchers who have passionately sought to articulate a distinct Southern expression of the right to the city. Their struggle and persistence give us confidence that a framing of ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’ is possible and indeed needed. Here, we do our best to integrate the well-known Northern framework with distinct Southern voices and engage with empirical studies from the South (Chatterji and Maitra, 2018; Lawanson and Udoma-Ejorh, 2020; Odendaal, 2018). This combined network of empirical thinking, knowledge development and our first-hand experience of how smart unfolds on the ground in Southern cities will provide the foundation to put forward ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’.

The right to the city

Theories of social justice are about the kind of social arrangements that can be defended (Barry, 1989) and appeal to different forms of authority and logic justifying or challenging socio-spatial processes (Harvey, 1996). Without getting into a deep conversation about the typologies of the theories of social justice – which is beyond the scope of this article – we acknowledge that pursuing a theoretical framework focused on a ‘just smart city in the Global South’ depends on how both ‘just’ and ‘social justice’ are defined. Indeed, for a libertarian, a neoliberal smart city approach prioritising the free-market is inherently ‘just’– despite the evident divides and inequalities. However, such a position is considered highly unjust by followers of several other schools of social justice, such as egalitarians, utilitarians and feminists.

In response to such a dilemma in the definition of a ‘just smart city’, Kitchin et al. (2019) argue that it is necessary for those involved to position themselves and articulate the social-justice theory which informs their pursuit of ‘just’. We, the authors, have already ‘laid our cards on the table’ as non-white women from the Global South. It is then only fair to acknowledge that our collective lived experience and intellectual journeys have informed us to be intersectional feminists in the hope of ‘reclaiming the urban’ (Biswas, 2022) against all the complex and cumulative ways in which discriminatory voices and forces combine, overlap, or intersect (Tormos, 2017) across time and space.

Therefore, we turn to ‘the right to the city’, which has its roots in Lefebvre’s ideas of social justice, as a potential framework to build a theory focused on the smart cities of the South. In doing so, as pointed out earlier in the article, we are cautious about relying on a framework that originated in the Global North; and yet, follow the footprints of numerous Global South researchers who have adopted this powerful rallying cry in their struggle against the exclusionary urban processes and the erosion of the rights in Southern urban spaces (Kuymulu, 2013; Samara et al., 2013).

Going back to the origin of the right to the city, Lefebvre (1996) built his influential concept around the idea that citizens should not just have the right to occupy and use space, but that space should be shaped according to its inhabitants’ needs. As such, the right to the city consists of the right of all city dwellers to enjoy urban life with all its advantages – the right to habitation – as well as having a direct part in managing cities – the right to participation (Fernandes, 2007). The right to the city is the right of the excluded, the distressed and the alienated to demand and receive a suite of related rights, such as the right to expression, the right to information, the right to culture, the right to identity in difference and equality, the right to protect the commons from private ownership, the right to political representation and the right to self-management (Isin, 2000; Marcuse, 2012).

Lefebvre (1996: 159) describes the right to the city as ‘a cry and a demand’, a cry out of necessity and a demand for something more. For Lefebvre, the cry for the right to the city comes from the most marginalised for whom even the most immediate needs are unfulfilled. The demand is of those excluded, not of the intelligentsia and the capitalists. Within this line of thinking, Marcuse (2009), focusing on the question of ‘whose right to the city’, makes it crystal clear that it is not everyone’s right to the city with which we are concerned, that there is a conflict among rights that needs to be acknowledged (some already have the right to the city, and are indeed running it). It is, then, the right to the city of those who do not have it with which we are concerned. The question, however, remains of who is most deeply affected and marginalised – which needs to be asked and answered in each unique context. We will come back to this question later in the article.

The right to the city in the Global South

As briefly pointed out above, there is a tendency in critical urban research (Kuymulu, 2013; Samara et al., 2013) to articulate the distinctive Southern expressions of the right to the city – informed by a foundation of fieldwork in the South. The distinct framing of ‘the right to the city in the Global South’ is mostly built on the notion of the divided city and the partiality of transformation in the Southern cities. Neither of these is unique to the Global South; what is different is the size of the marginalised multitudes and the extent of their deprivation, which makes informal urbanism a dominant mode of urbanisation in the South. Interestingly, a growing body of research (Fawaz, 2012) considers informal settlements to be the embodiment of the right to the city – as neighbourhoods where dwellers produce their living quarters, forwarding a conceptualisation of land as shelter and challenging the state-sanctioned and market-led conception of land as real-estate property.

Developing Southern expressions of the right to the city is still in the research phase; consequently, a range of reflections informed by empirical work are offered (Lata, 2021; Ren and Weinstein, 2012; Wissink, 2015) to unpack the magnitude of three interlocking modes of exclusion: physical, social and political; and the ways in which they are challenged by people and for people in the Southern cities. The urban resistance and the struggles to claim the right to the city in the Global South, in many cases, diverge from the established framings in the North (Murray, 2012) and yet are intertwined with the broader calls for urban policy and practice to integrate divided spaces and populations to build inclusive cities (Parnell and Pieterse, 2010; Zerah et al., 2011). Nevertheless, the right to the city in the Global South pushes for more radical forms of politicisation of urban conflict than the integrationist approaches have to offer (Kipfer et al., 2013).

At the risk of oversimplification, Murray (2012) identifies seven features of contemporary Southern urbanism which require more attention in order to fully capture the emerging notion of the right to the city in the Global South:

Theorising informal urbanism: While much has been written about broken-down infrastructure, overcrowded streets, and lack of municipal oversight in the informal settlements of the South (Davis, 2006), less is known about the complex dynamics of collaborations and networks that characterise the daily experience of the urban poor who carve out usable spaces for themselves in the contested geographies (Harding, 2007).

Instant urbanism: While the unprecedented rate of urbanisation in the South has shattered some assumptions about how cities look and function, the new instant cities (e.g. Dubai) are made of the generic models derived from elsewhere (Halpern et al., 2013) and need to be deeply scrutinised in terms of the unplanned implications (socio-economic, environmental, or otherwise) of their imported urbanism.

Bubble urbanism: Southern cities (in China, India, South Africa and beyond) have become experimental sites for huge mega-projects for real-estate developers and state-sanctioned agencies seeking to emulate what a world-class city should look like (Bose, 2013). Such mega-projects, however, come at the cost of seemingly endless cycles of eviction, displacement, land expropriation, privatisation of public services and environmental devastation.

Splintering urbanism: As part of the multifaceted process that Graham and Marvin (2001) call ‘splintering urbanism’, cities no longer provide comprehensive infrastructure and instead customise ‘premium networked spaces’ (Graham, 2000) for ‘valued’ users, enabling the urban elites to retreat into ‘secessionary’ spaces that are disconnected from the wider urban surroundings – forming archipelagos of ‘globalised enclaves’ (Graham and Marvin, 2001). In the Global South, splintering urbanism widens the gap between the haves and have-nots, sustaining the fragmentation of cities’ socio-spatial fabric alongside the bubble urbanism.

New modes of urban governance: As part of the widespread privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation – for which the ‘neoliberal city’ (Hackworth, 2007) serves as a convenient shorthand – urban governments in (mega) cities of the South have increasingly installed new regulatory regimes removing institutional and administrative barriers to make the market function efficiently (Demissie, 2011). Multiple accounts of a shadow state (Hentschel, 2013) increasingly responsible for service delivery and community development in different Southern cities weave together a complicated narrative that shrinks the power of elected governments.

Social justice: Increasingly marginalised groups across the Southern cities (informal settlement residents, informal economy participants etc.) are unable to call upon the law for support, yet are simultaneously subjected to its rules and regulations. In response, they assert their claims of social justice through engagement and active participation in illegal activities in their everyday struggle to live and work (Fawaz, 2009; Parnell and Pieterse, 2010; Roy, 2009b). Examples include non-legal occupation of land, infringement of property rights and bypassing building regulations.

The (re)appropriation of public space: Throughout the Global South, transformation of public space into ‘designer landscapes’ to sell the city in the image-conscious world of global neoliberalism has accelerated the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalisation of ‘unwanted’ others who encroach upon the aesthetic market-led and state-sanctioned expectations – by using public space as a site for the informal economy (Prasad et al., 2022). These post-public spaces have become sites of conflict, rivalry and contestation giving rise to ongoing tensions among street vendors, property owners and municipal authorities regarding who is entitled to use the public spaces and for what purposes. Because their efforts to make a living often fall outside the law, street vendors are vulnerable to harassment and subjected to fines and prosecution (Cross, 2007).

It is important to note that none of the above seven features of contemporary Southern urbanism is exclusive to the Global South, as evidence of growing inequity and inequality in the forms of increasing informality, splintering urbanism, privatisation of public spaces and government services are seen across the Global North. Nevertheless, what is unique to the Global South is the extreme scale and the sheer intensity of the trends discussed. The fact that such features are not limited to the South makes them more crucial to the broader field of urban studies. Learning from the Southern experience of these features has the potential to inform the urbanism trends everywhere. Later in the article, we will build on the above features of contemporary Southern urbanism to articulate the ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’.

The right to the smart city

There is an established line of critical smart urbanism literature which sheds light on how the ‘typical’ smart city agenda takes a technological solutionist approach, reinforces neoliberal urban policies, promotes corporatisation and privatisation of city services, increases control and surveillance and can reproduce and reinforce inequalities (Datta, 2015; Kitchin, 2015, 2016). Nevertheless, a relatively parallel line of the critical scholarship is shifting focus to ‘glimpses of possibilities’ (Hollands, 2015) in the smart city imaginaries by elevating the social dimensions of the discourse (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019; Joss et al., 2017). This is an extension of the right to the city framework, which builds on Fernandes’s (2007) focus on ‘the right to information’; and has resulted in a few working frameworks such as ‘digital rights to the city’ (Shaw and Graham, 2017b), ‘informational right to the city’ (Shaw and Graham, 2017a) and the ‘right to the smart city’ (Kitchin et al., 2019). These frameworks mainly push for citizens’ right to appropriation in the smart city and seek to advance an alternative form of ownership – not grounded in contracts and proprietary rights but rather in belonging to a collective.

Here, we further explore the notion of the ‘right to the smart city’ as part of the article’s mission in search of the Southern expression of just smart city. The right to the smart city (Kitchin et al., 2019) is still an evolving framework working through a set of related questions, such as how citizens are framed within smart cities and by whom; how public space and the urban commons are framed and regulated in the smart city, by whom and on what terms; and what systems and structures of inequality (e.g. racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, ageism, colonialism) are (re)produced within smart urbanism.

In response to such questions, a growing line of critical smart urbanism studies has focused on the absent citizens (Shelton and Lodato, 2019) – those excluded by smart city projects – to document how ordinary citizens access the city and produce alternative smart initiatives to challenge the neoliberal agenda. Terms such as ‘data commons’ (Cuff et al., 2008), ‘digital commons’ (Teli et al., 2015) and ‘informational commons’ (Boyle, 2008) suggest that data are valuable new resources for making decisions about collective issues impacting cities. To this end, Lange (2019) proposes the term ‘commons-as-interface’ in which interfacing is about finding a common language to let data speak to people (D’Ignazio et al., 2019) and create collective awareness and action implied by the right to the smart city.

As part of the mission to put the concept of ‘right’ at the centre of smart city discourse, other thought-proving and mostly pragmatic ideas have emerged. Examples include an emphasis on democratic governance of data infrastructures and the internet (Cardullo, 2019), civic tech (Schrock, 2019) working towards predominantly organisational reforms, and hackathons being repurposed as a means of activism (Perng, 2019). Nevertheless, most attempts to articulate the right to the smart city acknowledge the long road ahead to shift the dominant discourse towards addressing persistent inequalities, prejudice and discrimination; and to produce a normative vision for smart cities rooted in ideas of social justice and the public good.

With this in mind, Marcuse (2007) argues that the main role of critical urban research on the right to the smart city is to ‘expose, propose, and politicise’. As Marcuse (2012: 37) elaborates:

Expose in the sense of analysing the roots of the problem and making clear and communicating that analysis to those that need it and can use it. Propose, in the sense of working with those affected to come up with actual proposals, programmes, targets, strategies, to achieve the desired results. Politicise, in the sense of clarifying the political action implications of what was exposed and proposed and the reasoning behind them and supporting organising around the proposals by informing action.

We argue that there is something quite distinct to the current moment about locating the concepts of ‘expose, propose, and politicise’ smart cities in the South. If ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’ is to be fully understood, a number of ‘imaginative leaps’ must be taken by theorists currently hung up on the ‘cut and paste’ urbanism (Odendaal, 2019) that permeates policy mobility and reinforces several stereotypes around Southern cities, informal urbanism and smart development – strongly tied to the Northern normative constructs of the ‘good city’ (Barnett and Parnell, 2016).

A research agenda: The right to the smart city in the Global South

The vast empirical differences across many Northern and Southern cities, and the ongoing critique from the Southern scholars exposing the uncareful application of smart city theories, frameworks and programmes developed in the North which inadequately account for the Southern contexts (Odendaal, 2019), reiterate the immediate need for framing ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’. We are mindful of the problems with the binary implicit in our analysis of Northern and Southern smart urbanism. We, however, argue that such a constructed binary is necessary for understanding and articulating a just smart city, considering the ongoing oversight and imbalance in urban studies. Further, we are mindful of the limitations of providing Southern accounts in an area with (relatively) limited scholarship. In saying so, the sheer size of smart city investment across the Global South, from Asia to Southern America and Africa, suggests that a Southern account of smart urbanism is needed for the persistently growing trends of smart city policy and applications.

In this spirit, we take a leap of faith, arguing that the Southern urban critique and the Southern urbanism traditions – of shining light on the socio-spatial divisions of the Southern cities and acknowledging everyday people’s resistance and resilience in the face of a systematic process of dismissal and dispossession – are powerful tools to untangle the complexities of smart cities as one of the latest urban trends imposed on the Southern cities and Southern lives. Hence, what follows is meant as a constructive engagement towards a South-informed theory to encourage more research in the already-existing and in-the-making smart cities of the Global South – to learn from a contemporary urban trend (smart cities) to elevate the discourse of the right to the city in the Global South, and to produce a normative alternative vision for a ‘just smart city’ and ultimately ‘just city’ in the South.

Informed by the earlier discussions in the article, we follow Marcuse (2007) and offer an elaboration of ‘expose, propose and politicise’ to articulate ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’, informed by the features of Southern urbanism (Murray, 2012) and the array of ongoing empirical work on the subject in the Southern contexts – to show their potential to contribute to a collective framework for transformative understanding:

Expose

In order to expose the roots of the ‘smart city problem’ in the Global South, it is important to expose who is excluded and how. Further, an emphasis on who is excluded in the Southern smart city agenda exposes the limitations of participatory urban planning and decision-making rooted in the complexities and limitations of democracy across the South – as one of the many legacies of imperialism and colonisation (Alizadeh, 2021; King, 2015). This has, in turn, resulted in restrictive, and at times, controversial definitions of citizenship (Hiariej and Stokke, 2017) across many Southern cities as the voices of many (e.g. ethnic and religious minorities and migrant workers) are dismissed due to their (il)legal status. As fascinating as this is, discussing the ways in which citizenship is weaponised to silence and sideline many urban residents and justify the absence of their right to the city is beyond the scope of this article. However, it is important to note how the shortcomings in democracy and citizenship definitions lead to the limits of the planning process and, more specifically, who is dismissed, displaced and dispossessed by smart city planning and implementation.

Much case study research across the Global South exposes smart city limitations on the ground. Ghosh and Arora (2022), for example, examine the making of the smart city proposal submitted by New Town Kolkata (NTK) in India and show that the smart city imaginary largely fails to account for the vulnerable citizens’ needs – with city officials filtering and cherry-picking citizens’ voices in the consultation process. Further, based on ethnographic observation, Jirón et al. (2021) argue that the smart city intervention in Santiago, Chile is merely an urban placebo working through the fictions of urban image improvement seeking to participate in worlding practices – whilst, in reality, very little has been improved in the city. Another case study research from Brazil (Melgaço and Freitas de Souza, 2022) exposes the limitations of gamification as one of the new tools used in urban managements, showcasing its negative impact on excluding the voices of have-nots.

Acknowledging the (relatively) strong tradition of ‘expose’ in the Southern empirical smart urbanism research, we argue that a theoretical articulation – as part of the right to the smart city in the Global South framework – will empower the ongoing case study research in their fight for justice in the smart city discourse. Such a framework has the capacity to shed light on the gaps in the empirical evidence and pave the way for future research. What is included below is by no means comprehensive. Instead, this is mainly a list of the urban planning and policy features – informed by Murray’s (2012) articulation of Southern urbanism and the ongoing empirical research on the subject in Southern cities – through which people are excluded from the smart city agenda in the South:

Failure to recognise or give value to informal urbanism: The vast majority of smart city programmes across the Global South (e.g. India, Brazil and China) reinforce and reproduce the spatial and socio-economic exclusion and dispossession of marginalised groups by failing to recognise, give value and appropriately account for pre-existing urban informality (Prasad et al., 2023; Willis, 2019), where ‘informality must be understood as an idiom of urbanisation, a logic through which differential spatial value is produced and managed’ (Roy and AlSayyad, 2004: 233). An abundance of informal settlement demolition/clearance projects – integrated with ambitious smart city plans across the Southern cities to make ways for international IT parks and luxury housing to serve the sector – is mostly acknowledged in the existing empirical studies. Nevertheless, longitudinal studies are needed to fully expose the sheer impact of such exclusionary practices in the mainstream smart city development in the South.

Instant smart urbanism: The unprecedented rate of urbanisation in the South has enforced a sense of urgency (Datta, 2015) in the development of greenfield smart cities (e.g. Songdo, Dholera and The Line) – as the new instant cities – made of the generic North-centric smart city models and mostly under-scrutinised in terms of the socio-economic, environmental and equity implications of their imported urbanism. There is a constant uphill battle for critical (smart) urbanism research against the techno-political forces behind such a questionable trend; yet, the high environmental costs and equity implications mean silence is not an option.

Bubble smart urbanism: Global digital corporations have joined the international real-estate developers and state-sanctioned agencies to turn many Southern cities into experimental sites for mega-projects to emulate what a ‘world-class smart city’ should look like. Such mega-projects (e.g. major IT parks and complexes, and adjunct luxury housing and public services), however, accelerate the pre-existing cycles of dismissal, displacement and dispossession for those in lesser valued settings. While appearing to be inviting, these mega-projects and their surrounding spaces have become sites of conflict and contestation intensifying tensions regarding who is entitled to access to, use of and change in the city.

Splintering smart urbanism: Following the bubble urbanism pattern of smart city development across the South, the relevant critical infrastructure (e.g. data and telecommunication) has been customised in limited urban areas (e.g. IT parks are the equivalent of what Graham (2000) calls ‘premium networked spaces’) for ‘valued’ smart city users only, enabling them to settle in high-tech spaces that are disconnected from their urban surroundings, yet connected to similar tech-savvy places and people worldwide. In the Global South, the technology-enabled splintering smart urbanism further intensifies the scale of socio-spatial fragmentation and reinforces the notion of bubble smart urbanism.

New modes of smart urban governance: The smart city agenda across the Global South has pushed for new modes of government (e.g. Special Purpose Vehicle in India) integrated with optimisation and automation to pave the way for the public–private partnership required to expedite smart city development. The limited research on the subject, however, offers a complicated narrative in which the power of elected governments is reduced (Prasad et al., 2021), with increased socio-spatial fragmentations as low-paid and informal labour forces are made redundant (Willis, 2019). The broader concerns raised about the ways in which smart urban governance could restrict or delay democracy (Alizadeh, 2021; Meijer and Bolívar, 2016) suggest that further research is needed to expose the full extent of new techno-centric modes of governance.

Propose

In order to fully articulate the right to the smart city in the Global South, we need to imagine an alternative vision and propose realistically attainable steps with those affected by the neoliberal smart city agenda taking centre stage. As pointed out by Kitchin (2019) more inclusive and deliberative framing of citizen participation in the smart city, including more extensive public consultation, collaboration and coproduction with ‘absent citizens’ (Shelton and Lodato, 2019), is needed. This is, however, only possible if alternative forms of governmentality are in place to allow for broader and more inclusive definitions of citizenship, to respect self-determination and to restrict punitive practices enabled by algorithmic governance.

Nevertheless, we acknowledge that change in governmentality is a long shot considering the realities on the ground across the Global South. In the meantime, practical steps must be taken to reconfigure the Southern expressions of ‘just smart city’. This is when learning from the alternative notions of actually existing smart cities – the mechanisms already used by the urban poor, civic society organisations and those directly involved with urban informality to challenge the status quo – is strategically important and humbling. Documenting, reporting and promoting – and ultimately learning from – the informal communities that operate at the margins and yet have developed exceptionally resourceful and innovative ways of using technology for their benefit is a humbling exercise for many smart city researchers used to taking the lead – alongside policy makers and digital corporations – in smart city debates.

There is a great deal to learn from how urban informality adopts and works with technologies. The relatively limited and yet growing critical smart urbanism literature has documented how civil society across the Global South is using civic tech and data to challenge policy discourses (Odendaal, 2015) to appropriate technology for solving everyday challenges (Lawanson and Udoma-Ejorh, 2020), to make ‘hackable cities’ (Lange, 2019), to turn the ‘invisible’ (the informal, the marginalised) ‘visible’ through documentation practices (Odendaal, 2019), and to motivate social action across scales (Kellogg, 2016) including commoning practices for the provision of critical infrastructure (e.g. data, telecommunication) and public services (Bond, 2018).

We, however, argue that in working with and learning from the informal settlement’s residents, NGOs, activists and the broader civil society, the critical smart urbanism research should take a proactive approach without the tendency to lead the alternative smart city movement on the ground. The critical smart urbanism researchers – especially those based in the Global North institutions with access to financial resources – should fight for funding opportunities directed towards Southern cities (as the most fascinating, complex and understudied cities of our time with the potential to transform how we understand urbanism). Most importantly, the critical smart city researchers – and all those in favour of critical urban theory – should fight for the research funding that allows local voices to be included and compensated for their time and contribution. Basically, as part of the notion of proposing an alternative urban imaginary – for a just smart city in the Global South – an alternative research funding model needs to be enacted to enable far more than just collecting data from the already existing alternative Southern smart urbanism, to empower true collaborative action research, and to be part of the solution by advocating for and supporting local voices in their fight for justice.

Politicise

In a time when the post-political notion of cities is gaining attention in critical urban research and theory (Beveridge and Koch, 2019; Davidson and Iveson, 2015), we argue that in order to articulate, and most importantly, achieve ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’ politicising has to be on the agenda. For us, politicising is the logical next step after the action research and advocacy work that the critical smart urbanism researchers need to conduct to be part of imaging and implementing an alternative just smart city in the South. It is also helpful to go back to the earlier discussion over ‘whose right to the city’ and the emphasis on the competing rights within each city. As pointed out before, we are concerned with the absence of rights; hence, we side with those who do not have the right to the dominated neoliberal smart city in the Global South. This should explicitly reflect on how we politicise the issue and with whom we join forces. The answer here comes from the first notion in this framework, ‘expose’, as it provides the space to carefully identify those who are dismissed, dispossessed, and displaced as part of the smart city practices. The second notion, within the framework, ‘propose’ provides opportunities to build relationships and kinship through advocacy work, and then comes politicising.

We suggest that a two folded approach is required to clarify the political implications of ‘the right to smart city in the Global South’ and to inform action. First, Southern critical urban research has to document, report and promote the urban resistance already happening in response to what has been exposed in terms of the shortcomings of the neoliberal smart city agenda, and in light of what has been proposed as an alternative smart city visioning and implementation. In several cases across the Global South, civic society has already succeeded in incorporating the recognition of the right to the city into national and regional constitutions and adopting a ‘right’ approach in legally challenging massive smart and technology-enabled initiatives (Fernandes, 2021). For example, the right to the city has been formally recognised in Brazil’s City Statute federal law. Considering the extent of the smart city development in Brazil, this could be a promising start for legalising/politicising the right to a smart city in that context. Further, the civil society in India has already challenged both Aadhaar (the national digital identification scheme) (Amrute et al., 2020) and AarogyaSetu (the national Covid (tracing) application) (Dhindsa and Kaushik, 2020) questioning their restrictive impact on the fundamental rights of the citizens (privacy, access to basic services etc.).

Nevertheless, limited research (Odendaal, 2018; Willis, 2019) from across the Global South suggests further investigation is needed to fully capture the dynamics of urban resistance – led by the marginalised sections of the civic society. There is a long way to go to fully articulate the political implications, including the risks involved in responding to what is exposed and promoting what is proposed. This is another area in which the critical smart urbanism researchers located in the safety of the Global North institutions have to be proactive and share the load, as the burden to politicise the right to the smart city in the Global South should not solely fall on those at the front line of resistance (informal economy participants, informal settlement residents and related NGOs and activists), nor on the scholars located in the Southern cities (as the cost of being an academic activist in certain political contexts across the Global South could be extremely high). Further, the numerous international academic conferences debating smart cities – hosted by prestigious institutions and organisations in the North – should give space and provide funding to support, empower and echo the Global South voices and stories of resistance and basically check for the geographical coverage of the research discussed to be an accurate representation of the complex urban world in which we live.

Second, to fully enact the oppositional voice and keep critical social justice issues in the public imagination, critical smart urbanism research needs to scrutinise the ways in which the ongoing (and yet normalised) global COVID pandemic has pushed cities across the South to reshape their smart city efforts and leverage smart solutions and facilities in the fight against the pandemic and to stimulate the pandemic-hit economies. This is a vital element of ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’ as the ongoing COVID pandemic has reinforced the global push for smart city development. Many governments around the world (e.g. China and India) have expedited their smart city expenditure to help with the smart tracing of COVID cases, facilitating working-from-home and home schooling capabilities, and also stimulating the pandemic-hit economies (James et al., 2020; Ren, 2020). For example, 47 of the 100 Indian smart city Command and Control Centres were redeployed as ‘Covid War Rooms’ to lead the city-level emergency response (Bailey et al., 2021). It is noted (Das, 2020) that many smart cities across the South have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to innovate, learn, collaborate and find ways to respond to the crisis. Critics, on the other hand, are concerned that ‘CovTech’– as public-sector-led technologies of monitoring, management and containment of the virus – violate data privacy protocols, are opaque (Datta, 2020), and can be used as surveillance tools (Kitchin, 2020) by the government with devastating impacts on marginalised groups (Datta et al., 2021).

We argue that ‘smart’ responses to the global pandemic – across the Global South – are multiscale and have different modes of existence, and further research is required to capture their complex socio-spatial implications and to enable appropriate political action on the ground. Critical investigation of the ways in which smart city development across the South has been consolidated, expedited and elevated to fight COVID will shed light on the opportunities and challenges embedded in smart urbanism in response to the crisis (whether economic, environmental or otherwise).

Conclusion

This positioning piece starts by acknowledging the progress made within urban studies, in terms of opening to Southern cities, scholars and ideas generated from the South. Here, we (the authors) draw on our lived and academic experiences as women of the Global South and think strategically about ‘the Southern urban critique’, ‘the right to city’ and ‘smart cities’, as well as some limitations of doing so. We share our frustration – informed by the critical literature (Edensor and Jayne, 2012; Lawhon and Le Roux, 2019; Roy, 2009a) – that despite the increasing rate of empirical research in the Global South cities, the urban theory is still dominated by Northern cities and scholars. For far too long, cities in the North played an outsized role in theorising cities on a global scale, contributing to the structural neglect of theorising ‘other’ cities (Samara et al., 2013).

In response to such structural neglect, we put forward a research agenda to establish and to take realistically attainable steps towards ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’– through the three lenses of expose, propose and politicise – articulating the smart city shortcomings from a Southern critical perspective to produce a normative alternative Southern expression for ‘just smart city’. ‘The right to the smart city in the Global South’ originates from Lefebvre’s ‘the right to the city’ framework, builds on a dialogue with Marcuse’ take on ‘the right to the smart city’ agenda, and is informed by the ongoing empirical research on smart city planning and development in the Southern cities. The links with the distinguished Southern empirical research allow for a Southern expression of the just smart city to formulate and then – in turn – to advance the empirical tradition of case study research in the South in our collective fight for socio-spatial justice.

Our challenge to readers is to help make such smart cities. The challenge to readers is to engage and reflect on the arguments made in this piece, to take on our call to locate Marcuse’s notion of expose, propose and politicise praxes of smart cities in the Southern context, and then complement this with further development of normative, future-oriented work to fully map out the particularities of an alternative Southern smart city and to enact the right to the smart city in the Global South.

Framing of ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’ can only improve through engaging and interacting with other critical minds as we build inclusive transnational urban studies respectful to and deepened by the diversity of urbanisation around the world. We reiterate our hope – noted at the beginning of the article – for a future in which binary terms such as Global South versus Global North or smart versus ordinary are needed less. We strive to create and contribute to an urban discourse that is rigorously mindful of the inequities and inequalities (re)produced across space. In order to reach such an inclusive urban future, we urge all urban researchers to think more carefully about what it means to work ‘from’ the South or through a ‘critical Southern urban’ lens to collectively attend to the historic and ongoing imbalances and oversights in urban studies.