Abstract
This chapter draws on theories of sovereignty to explore how Smart Urbanism excludes in the name of inclusion. We focus on the powerful mix of symbols, fears, desires and ambivalences that come together in Smart Urbanism to present it as a viable, desirable and inevitable answer to the crisis of the urban. Crisis figures prominently in this process. Indeed, conceptions of futurity and the power of sovereign decision revolve around the delineation of crises and forms of disorder, and the possible modes of managing, mitigating, resolving or surviving them. The paper offers concrete examples of how urban planners and policy makers draw upon ideas about the management of crisis and disorder to continually transform natural, social and built environments. It does so to show how those who claim to transform, order, build and preserve humanity’s urban future end up sustaining the inherited hierarchies that generate its present crises.
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Notes
- 1.
The conference was titled, ‘Urban Inequalities: Ethnographic Insights’. It took place at the University of Peloponnese in Corinth, Greece, on 20–22 June 2019.
- 2.
Her paper was titled, ‘Urban Inequalities and the Quest for the “Right” Linguistic Competence: Ethnographic Insights into the Lived Experience of Migrants in London’.
- 3.
His paper was titles, ‘Ethnic Enclaves Reimagined in the Global City: An Ethnography of Co-ethnic Socio-religious Networks on London’s Old Kent Road’.
- 4.
The designers and backers of Dholera, unlike Songdo, were keen to portray images of a city that posited itself as a solution to particularly Indian kinds of problems. It may be no coincidence that Dholera’s location in the now Prime Minister Modi’s state of Gujarat dovetails with the complicity between right-wing Hindu nationalism and India’s business elite, which comprises the richest in the world.
- 5.
Even so, the ability of the sovereign to declare a state of exception and to reduce any citizen to a condition of bare life, according to Agamben, defines the very essence of the position of the sovereign. Bare life is thus the dark underside of what Agamben calls political life (bios), a spectre that can be invoked at any time. Bare life is the negative condition that defines the very possibility of what Agamben calls political life. Agamben’s work has been extensively (if critically) employed across multiple academic disciplines. His writings have been especially influential among scholars who explore contexts where violence (or the threat thereof) is used by state (or state-like) representatives in their everyday dealings with vulnerable populations. Indeed, many regard Agamben’s work on sovereignty, violence, bare life and the exception as an important corrective to Foucault’s work on biopolitics, with its emphasis on the management of life rather than death.
- 6.
- 7.
We understand sovereignty as a claim rather than an established fact or a social condition—or rather, as a claim that masquerades as a social condition. It is the conflation of claim and fact that compromises Agamben’s theory of sovereignty. To take but one example, was it simply the sovereign’s decree that resulted in the concentration camps in World War II? Hardly. Much ink has been spilled in an effort to make sense of the complex processes that resulted in this particular sovereign ban being implemented. To conflate claim/ban and imposition of ban is to presume what must be explained.
- 8.
Akhil Gupta (2012) is among the few scholars to examine a context (contemporary India) in which, contra Agamben, sovereigns use the law to include rather than exclude marginalized groups—many of whom suffer terribly nonetheless.
- 9.
- 10.
This concern with recovering what has been lost so as to restore a healthy state can be seen in the example of the Nazi final solution. While the Jews had become an important part of German society their (partial) integration was a recent phenomenon, and one that was the cause of much concern. Nazi ideology clearly had a future orientation, but that future was predicated on recuperating a lost past—on transforming the (fallen) present into a purer one by ridding society of those elements that were degrading the nation.
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Nugent, D., Suhail, A. (2021). Crisis, Disorder and Management: Smart Cities and Contemporary Urban Inequality. In: Pardo, I., Prato, G. (eds) Urban Inequalities. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51724-3_8
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