Smart futures: Temporality and speculative development in the smart city of Pune, India

The Smart Cities Mission (SCM), an urban development programme, was launched in India in 2015, with the vision of creating 100, expertise-driven, smart cities that would be akin to ‘world cities’. A key feature of this programme is its ‘lighthouse’ approach, wherein most of the smart city projects are concentrated in a small, designated area within the city limits, to create a guiding model for future city development. Drawing from literature that argues that space is not just created geographically but co-constituted temporally, I examine the case of the Pune smart city in western India using a combination of fieldwork data and documentary analysis. I argue that through its ‘lighthouse’ approach, the SCM creates what I call ‘time enclaves’ within geographically contiguous spaces, spatialising time in a way that disassociates the selected areas from the rest of the city. These enclaves operate in a future time, ‘ahead’ of the rest of the city, representing progress and wealth that is always imminent, but never reachable. Operating in a future with an undefined (and therefore unlimited) potential for prosperity, time enclaves are lucrative zones, facilitating speculation for profit. In Pune, the material manifestation of this vision, mediated through the present, has resulted in the appropriation of the smart city tag by local real estate developers and political elites for their own gain. Thus, unravelling the garb of futurism of smart city reveals another dimension of the workings of ‘the anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson, 1994) and its consequences for widening urban inequalities and development.