Moving beyond ‘smart’: Uncovering traditional knowledge in informality

Abstract

In response to a variety of open questions and concerns raised by the set of commentaries on Prasad et al., this response offers clarifications and a way forward about, first, the need to re-conceptualise informality with smart urbanism and, second, the implications of understanding the interrelationship between informality and smart urbanism through traditional knowledge in the broader field of urban studies.

Introduction

I am incredibly grateful to Prince Guma, Tathagata Chatterji, and Nancy Odendaal for their thoughtful responses. Each commentary, although different, highlights several silences and slippages in the paper, ‘Smart City Planning and the Challenges of Informality in India’ (Prasad et al., 2024), while also developing new lines of dialogue. Each agrees that if informality offers something to smart urbanism, it enables us to see through the lens of traditional knowledge the related values of diversity, innovation, and resistance. In references to processes as diverse as urban experimentation, social mobilisation, and digitalisation, the commentaries suggest that understanding informality includes a style of analysis that traces everyday practices, accounts for evolution, and recognises setbacks. However, the particular ways these values are addressed in smart urbanism produce silences and absences. There is an urgent need to explore the interrelationships between informality and smart urbanism to identify what new capacities are created by informal communities, with what exclusions, how these are being developed and contested, where this is happening (the types of informal settings), and what sort of socio-technical and environmental consequences result.

Staying committed to the principles of the original paper, which presented the need to highlight the phenomenon of urban informality in smart urbanism (and not to be overlooked as a challenge), and taking up the most critical and consistent open questions and concerns raised in the commentaries (Chatterji, 2024; Guma, 2024; Odendaal, 2024), here, I develop two lines of dialogue: first, the need to re-conceptualise informality with smart urbanism and, second, the implications of understanding the interrelationship between informality and smart urbanism through traditional knowledge in the broader field of urban studies.

Informality and smart urbanism

The starting point for the paper is, as Guma and Odendaal point out, an urgent need to re-conceptualise informality with smart urbanism. Through smart urbanism, informality slips between its appearance as a concept that demands inquiry and can be expressed in inclusive and multiculturally sensitive practices. However, smart urbanism is fundamentally concerned with excluding informality, specifically the urban poor or informal sector, with multiple processes involving socio-spatial, political, material, and technological segregations. Scholars of smart urbanism have typically understood issues of exclusion in informality – for example, exclusion in planning systems, basic infrastructure and service provision, and from participation – as topics of concern. However, there is a risk that smart urbanism scholarship, which focuses exclusively on such exclusions, tends to exemplify such problems at the expense of everyday realities and resilience and appears to make claims for inadequate policy, planning, and practice, and to neglect the deeply rooted ways in which informality is tied to multiple other social, technical, and environmental agendas.

Such an emphasis on the exclusions of informality may have been an unintended effect of the anchor article in this forum, and it was this part that I struggled with most. My difficulty turned toward how to articulate informality in a way that is at once indeterminate in smart urbanism and yet certainly distinct and dominant in the Global South. I was not entirely satisfied with the characterisation of informality as a challenge of ‘inequity and inequality’ in smart cities when, in the first place, informality as a concept is lost or lacking in smart urbanism. When working closely in this field, it is too easy to forget what the everyday practices, traditions, and local histories of informality can do for the complex challenges of smart urbanism with which we must be concerned. Guma's commentary also provokes a reflection on recasting informality beyond completist and reductive conceptualisations of smart cities. For instance, Guma turns to a more ‘open and inclusive’ understanding of informality with smart urbanism that captures smart cities’ intricate, complex, and diverse realities in the Global South. Arguably, smart urbanism also has traditionally sensitive characteristics related to informality, such as bottom-up participation, grassroots movements, community activism, and tactical day-to-day adoption of technology. However, such realities and their traditional knowledge have only begun gaining traction. That smart urbanism is deeply entwined with informality means that we must view informality not as a ‘problem’ to be solved but as an everyday reality structured through socio-technical and environmental orders that pervade smart urbanism's mundane and imaginative characteristics.

We can understand informality in many other ways by spotlighting the everyday traditions – all of which can inform the smart city's dominant, utopian, and exclusionary notions. Once we begin to see informality as an everyday realisation rather than a set of development strategies, it becomes less challenging to identify a one-to-one correspondence between an informal set of practices and a single, internally coherent concept of smart cities. I would argue that it is precisely in attending to the everyday processes of informality through which a smart city comes to be formed and re-formed (theoretically and practically) that informality and its traditional knowledge need to be articulated. For instance, informality demonstrates the multiplicity and hybridity of smart and local knowledge as traditional approaches of jugaad (the smart/technically mediated life and the constant need to find workarounds, clever fixes, and repairs). Informality displays innovative use of smart technology in long-established social mobilisation practices and grassroots activism. As sites of urban experimentation, informality exhibits the routine capacity to self-organise and restructure smart city initiatives to enable new forms of smartness to emerge. Through the typical power of negotiation, informality bypasses formal smart systems to develop direct clientelistic relationships with political actors. Therefore, I argue that in smart urbanism, we must insist on the traditional orientation that focuses on informality's power rather than its powerlessness. This direction allows smart urbanism to account for the positive, negative, or hybrid impacts of smart interventions with informality. Indeed, reorienting our interrogation of informality away from the frame of problems that require specific smart solutions towards learning how they can be understood as traditional knowledge opens the scope of what is deemed viable and necessary in the smart urbanism domain.

Traditional knowledge in urban informality

The paper and its responses prefigure a revised and reinvigorated commitment to theorising and researching the interrelationship between informality and smart urbanism. The current understanding of this interrelation lacks a traditional perspective compounded by an excessive focus on exclusionary tendencies, disregarding the socio-technical and environmental domains. There is a need for a more in-depth examination of the traditional processes, practices, and patterns of informality and their transformational prospects for smart urbanism. Such traditional knowledge fundamentally shaped with and through digital technologies remains beyond the reach of urban studies.

Within this context, I set a broader research agenda to conceptualise traditional knowledge in informality with smart urbanism and detail what is required to address this. The first step is to develop an interdisciplinary theoretical approach for analysing traditional knowledge in informality. This means examining how traditional knowledge is conceptualised within urban informality and, more broadly, within urban studies and social sciences, recognising areas for agreement and disagreement, and then considering what theorisations of the interrelation of smart urbanism strategies offer for conceptualising traditional knowledge in informality. Unpacking the concept starts with an overview of the critical debates and official/informal players involved in developing traditional strategies in informality and identifying implications for smart urbanism. Discussing these implications beyond the conventional technical aspects allows for recognising the presence of the mainstream and alternative ways that traditional knowledge is being rolled out in smart cities by informal communities and across diverse informal environments. Critically unpacking the emerging broad trends identifies, for example, the role of technology in the constitution of traditional knowledge, the emergence of digitally associated informal mechanisms within this context, and the challenges associated with the appropriateness of digital technologies in informal settings. Also, embracing the tensions between official perspectives and critical research on traditional knowledge is crucial to identifying and discussing the risks and uncertainties associated with the interrelation between informality and smart urbanism.

The second step is to analyse the socio-technical and environmental implications of implementing traditional knowledge in informality, examine how specific smart urbanism conditions facilitate and impede traditional knowledge transitions within informality, and co-produce alternate approaches. A thorough examination of how traditional knowledge is produced and reproduced in specific informal settings within smart cities helps to understand the potential and implications of transitioning to traditional knowledge and the opportunities for creating more sustainable and socially inclusive approaches. A combination of discursive, techno-material, and spatial analysis allows an understanding of socio-technical and environmental aspects of traditional knowledge in informality. Discursive analysis can identify the development of new philosophies of how traditional knowledge is constructed in informality via smart technology. Such analysis would consider various discourses involving diverse logics underpinning traditional knowledge that embed different approaches to the intersection of informality and smart urbanism. Additionally, spatial analysis can show the existing traditional patterns and the possible emergence of new patterns in informal settings. By doing this, it is possible to identify the configuration of smart initiatives in informal settings – such as lanes, streets, shopfronts, community centres, places of worship, abandoned lots, garbage landfills, and vacant lands – where communal life and traditions come alive. Identifying evidence of how smart initiatives fix or break traditional practices and patterns in informality is crucial.

The third step is to develop a new understanding of the forms, patterns, and outcomes of traditional knowledge in informality in an internationally comparative context. Existing studies on traditional knowledge in informal or marginalised societies, peoples, or populations are in their infancy, limited to specific disciplines, and look at a single case study. There needs to be more comparative examination and understanding of the range of smart contexts within which traditional strategies in urban informality are materialising. Though marked as isolated developments, smart cities distinctly challenge, promote, disturb, rebel, and rephrase traditional knowledge in informality. Accordingly, it is essential to examine the different rationalities, methods, and subjectivities in which traditional knowledge in informality is being rolled out across smart cities in contrasting geographies to understand how traditional ideologies configure informal spaces and how they broadly correlate to smart city projects. There is also value in investigating both the macro interventions and the micro ways that traditional knowledge shapes informal life and forms informal spaces in the smart city, as well as identifying drivers that play a vital role in the rollout of such interventions.

Such a geographically comparative approach is essential when considering urban informality as a global phenomenon. There is a need to explore the contradictions of traditional knowledge in informality, its diverse expressions across the Global North and South, and the potential this creates to reassess smart urbanism within these contexts. While the dominant study of smart urbanism in the Global South overlooks informality and focuses on redeveloping informal settings into smart interventions, it is also worth studying the interrelationship between informality and smart urbanism by emphasising the traditional knowledge in that local context. Therefore, a dialogue about the multiple ways in which traditional knowledge is being imagined and enacted in informality, taking place in diverse smart cities and aiming for methodical comparison, would be a significant step in this direction.