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Abstract
India has recently embarked on a massive smart cities mission aiming to use modern technologies to develop sustainable solutions across 100 selected cities. The national government-sponsored initiative appears ambiguous regarding a precise understanding of the ‘smart city’ concept in the Indian context. It is unclear how the Smart City Plan will converge with the broader urban development framework and how local governance needs to be reorganised to deal with the smart city challenge. This thesis begins by examining debate around the smart city concept itself and building a bottom-up approach to define smart cities in the local Indian context. The analysis presented in this study shows that the smart cities definition should not only focus on digital technology but should also integrate the fundamentals of the sustainable city and smart community to emerge as a holistic concept. The research then identifies an appropriate indicator system and builds urban typologies for identification of relative advantage and disadvantage across smart cities. It offers an approach employing cluster analysis to group the 100 selected cities and discriminant analysis to establish the statistical validity of those groups and identify the key factors that distinguish between the ‘leading group’ of cities and the those ‘on the edge’. The urban typology analysis results show that significant disparities remain across Indian regions regarding access to social capital, higher education, health and digital infrastructure. By identifying groups of cities with shared challenges and opportunities, this study generates a new discourse on place-based smart city strategies. Further, this thesis provides a critical appraisal of smart city policies and governance instruments in select case study areas. An integrated smart city planning and institutional strategy is developed for inclusive smart cities development. The discussions in this research link the global theoretical development of smart cities with local urbanisation challenges and aspirations and provide a much-needed scholarly basis for the development of smart cities in India.