ABSTRACT
The final chapter concludes how SCM offers a paradigm shift essentially of technology driven city utopias and imaginations that override the (in)discipline, messiness of existing cities. It is true that technology especially digital technologies have significantly altered India’s urban story in many ways. Yet tech driven city utopias like the current smart city narrative poses serious challenges, leaves unaddressed gaps and opens new arenas of vulnerabilities and risks. SCM is a trajectory of private capital led neoliberal urbanization that promotes an urbanism of impersonalized spaces symbolized with the rapid rupture of the urban tissue in inner cities and disconnect from the larger region with escalating impacts on long term goals of urban inclusion and urban sustainability. SCM as is currently pursued in India is a trajectory with misplaced priorities, sometimes lopsided often ignoring urbanization trends, quintessential features of Indian urbanism like informality, crucial components of urban form, and their interrelationships, cultural and social practices of people and communities eventually reducing cities as laboratories for sporadic experiments usually with technologies supplied by global giants. There is time for course correction if we pause and reflect on the current trajectory and factor in crucial components that have been ignored.
