ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the use of metaphors in the relatively new urban development paradigm of the “smart city” as a means to understand what urban futures are imagined for Indian cities. To this end, it analyses policy guidelines and advertising videos of the Smart Cities Mission as well as interviews conducted with urban planners working on smart city projects within the Mission. The concept of co-production in Science and Technology Studies in combination with literature on the performativity of metaphors provides a framework to understand how policymakers and planners conceptualise and interpret the smart city and the impact this has on urban development. The findings show that the smart city is presented as a turnkey solution for cities in the Global South to help them achieve world-class status with the aspiration to skip steps in development to surpass the current state of infrastructure in these cities. The data flows promised by the smart city reinforce instrumental rationality in urban planning that seeks a stable and objective truth, diminishing the idea of the city as a plethora of competing discourses and ways of living, governed and mediated at many levels with various kinds of power.
