Design for India’s Elastic Cities

by Anab Jain

By 2030, 40% of India’s population will live in cities. That’s the equivalent of 590 million people, up from 350 million in 2010.

Clearly, the combination of internal migration and population growth will place a unique stress on India’s urban infrastructure. Already, plenty of work has been done on the resilience of physical infrastructure: the channels of water supply, sanitation, and power. But what of the city’s ‘soft’ infrastructure; the immaterial flows of data and social relations?

As plans for the digital augmentation of our cities gather pace, we find ourselves wondering how such schemes might be enacted in an Indian context. Given the complex, chaotic and often illegible nature of its urban landscape, and stepping back from the top-down masterplans of Masdar and New Songdo, what would a ‘smart’ Mumbai look like? What might it be like to live there?