Busting the Smart Citizen Myth

Kunal Kumar, Joint Secretary and Mission Director (Smart Cities), Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs

India’s Smart Cities Mission champions the cause of localization of the process of city development. Citizen engagement is the mantra at the core of this new urban thought. But who is the citizen? Is there a ‘standardized’ citizen – generalizable, interchangeable entity with no distinctive personality, preferences, or history? Is citizen singular or plural? Is citizen merely the beneficiary in the development process?

The culinary world helps me connect some dots. I have started cooking occasionally and find it to be a great stressbuster. Recipes are least of the problem thanks to the internet. Though I possibly churn out reasonably good stuff, its flavor and aroma don’t come anywhere close to the fare dished out by my mother. And that remains the case, even with new recipes or a fusion of different ones. What’s going on here?

My logical brain found an answer – why don’t I ask her to pen down her recipe and use it instead of the one on internet. That way, I could unravel her ‘trade secret’. I tried her written recipe. That too didn’t work! It seems her knowledge is so implicit and automatic that she cannot capture it in words. She tries to explain her art by slicing it down into technical bits, but such narration does not represent much of what she knows. Only a small part of her knowledge seems reduceable to explanation. Come to think of it, recipes that define an activity like cooking, don’t precede the activity but develop over time as a product of that activity. Nuanced, fuzzy details of how to use those recipes are picked up through long years of practice and are un-includable in them in the first place. It’s akin to a book which is better understood when read along with the notes scribbled on its pages’ sides.

We see a lot of this in our neighborhoods. Gardeners, firefighters, doctors, musicians, drivers all have this trait in common. Through multiple experiences and adjustments over time, they tend to develop an un-codifiable mastery of their trade. If there was a means to quantify their local knowledge into mathematical units, am sure we would be staggered by the gross local knowledge in society. This quantification cannot be based on routine parameters like number of degrees in case of a doctor. It would rather be based on his record in curing patients. Local knowledge grows through practical success. Has the garden flourished under the gardener? Does the cook make tasty food?

In a neighborhood, local knowledge continuously accumulates over time through a web of daily practice, interactions, and experience among neighborhood constituents. Their worm’s-eye-view and minute observations of the environment nourish it. Unlike an urban planner appointed to create a plan for the neighborhood who does not have to live the consequences of his own advice, the neighborhood has its ‘skin in the game’ with direct stake in the outcomes of application of its knowledge. Besides, the body of knowledge that constantly evolves in a neighborhood cannot be matched by any individual or organization or any group of them. Is there a larger point here? Isn’t the urban planner’s professional, scientific, and accomplished knowledge of planning akin to the generic recipe which will end up producing suboptimal results unless it consciously draws upon the nuanced, unwritten, contextual local knowledge that resides in the residents of the neighborhood? Isn’t this local knowledge akin to the notes scribbled on the book’s pages or the implicit knowledge of my mother?

Moreover, there is a fundamental difference between generic rules and local knowledge. Urban planning, for example, takes place in a unique place (neighborhood, culture) at a unique time (current affairs, demography) and has unique goals (needs, plans). A meticulous implementation of generic planning rules (building regulations, development rules) disregarding local specifics (culture, usage patterns) will invite practical failures and public disillusionment. Let’s take another example, engineers creating roads for moving people and vehicles. Their failure to account for unplanned activities like window shopping, street vending, dog walking, eating ice-cream, meeting friends etc. diminishes the user experience significantly. Inability to dovetail local knowledge into generic processes leads to suboptimal functionality of assets created.

That brings me back to the citizen. The citizen, as we have seen, is a custodian of local knowledge, initiative, experience and provides the neighborhood its distinct identity. They form communities and communities aggregate into neighborhoods each with their unique culture, history, and repositories of local knowledge. The citizen not only contributes to but is also enriched by such knowledge as it churns through multiple, stochastic feedback loops active within the neighborhood. Cities that fail to draw upon this priceless asset will miss out on a wide range of skills and experience, thereby failing in their aspirations to build healthier communities, stronger economies, and sustainable environments.

And this leads me to the myth of the smart citizen. How often do we hear someone say, ‘our cities will become smart only when our citizens become smart.’ The term ‘smart citizen’ itself is a tautology much like stating ‘8 am in the morning’. It’s time we shun the idea of an ‘abstract’ citizen. Citizens are unique, diverse, have different genders, needs and aspirations. They possess the city’s ‘secret recipe’. If only cities could tap into it by nurturing a tradition of continuous dialogue and negotiation, creating mechanisms for exchange of ideas between diverse constituents and institutionalizing the test-learn-scale approach to breed locally relevant solutions, they would function, grow and adapt better!