Smart Cities, Urbanization & Infrastructure Justice

Cities are not neutral spaces — they are systems that distribute access, opportunity, and risk. Infrastructure determines who receives reliable water, safe mobility, digital connectivity, cooling, sanitation, and public space — and who does not.

This theme examines urbanization through the lens of infrastructure justice. India offers a uniquely instructive case: the Smart Cities Mission produced a large portfolio of digital command-and-control centers, urban dashboards, mobility projects, public space redesigns, and governance reforms. These interventions provide rich empirical material to analyze the relationship between data platforms, infrastructure finance, maintenance regimes, and lived inequality.

Students treat the city as a laboratory — conducting transect walks, service-journey mapping, neighborhood equity audits, stakeholder interviews, and governance clinics. The emphasis is not on showcasing projects, but on interrogating how infrastructure decisions redistribute opportunity.

The culminating output is a faculty-gradeable Infrastructure Justice Audit with maps, governance analysis, and policy recommendations.

Students will:

Conduct neighborhood-scale infrastructure equity audits (“who gets what, where, and why”).
Apply field methods: transect walks, spatial observation, stakeholder mapping, service-journey documentation, and informal interviews.
Analyze Smart Cities Mission project logic, financing models, sustainability challenges, and maintenance trade-offs.
Evaluate digital governance tools (dashboards, ICCCs) in relation to transparency and accountability.
Use global urban frameworks (New Urban Agenda, SDG 11) to critique local implementation realities.
Produce an assessable Infrastructure Justice Audit Report with spatial maps and policy recommendations.
Develop a comparative case study contrasting two neighborhoods or two cities.