Reimagining the streetscapes of Varanasi city: Public art, urban regeneration and smart city practices

Abstract The present research posits public art as a ubiquitously employed but equally underexplored subject of academic interest, addressing the sharply emerging notion of ‘smart urbanism’ in contemporary India. Drawing on a prolonged ethnographic engagement with the time‐worn Galis in Varanasi city and seven in‐depth interviews conducted with key informants in the city, this study explores the contemporary panacea of (re)producing urban space in accordance with the norms of smart urbanism, undertaken by one of the largest post‐independence mega‐scale urban infrastructural development programmes in India, namely the National Smart Cities Mission. This endeavour thus seeks to exemplify the potential of public art to endorse what is (and should be) apparent and conceivable in a heritage city with immense cultural importance, and dwells on the question of whether such interventions in situ can (re)produce social, cultural and economic capital in a smart city through a symbolic representation of urban space. Building principally on a qualitative mode of inquiry called ‘geographical ethnography’, the present study has elucidated the emerging relationships among people, space and institutional decision‐making, and how such mechanisms are adding to the identity of Varanasi city along two opposite temporal spectrums of urban existence: heritage and smartness.