Urban Sociology

Lec 16: 29/02/2024

Urban poverty/inequality

Dr. Amrita Sen

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
email: [email protected]
URBAN INEQUALITY
• Pierre Bourdieu utilizes four concepts to explain social
inequality: habitus, field, capital and symbolic violence.

• A field is a ‘site of struggle’ whereby agents have to compete to

gain monopoly amongst these fields; ‘struggles over the power
to define each field’.

• Habitus are socialized norms or tendencies that guide

behaviour and thinking.

• Capital means power; the capacity to exert control over one’s

future.

• It is this ‘differential distribution of capital’ that structures society.

• Symbolic violence is the imposition of systems of symbolism

and meaning (i.e. culture) upon groups or classes in such a way
that they are experienced as legitimate.
 Urban Sociology

Lec 17: 01/03/2024

Urban inequality

Dr. Amrita Sen

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
email: [email protected]
• Explanations of poverty can be grouped under two main headings: theories that see poor
individuals as responsible for their own poverty, and theories that view poverty as
produced and reproduced by structural forces in society.

• These competing approaches are sometimes described as 'blame the victim' and 'blame
the system’ theories, respectively.

• Charles Murray- ‘dependency culture’

• By this term, Murray refers to poor people who rely on government welfare provision
rather than entering the labour market.

• He argues that the growth of the welfare state has created a subculture that undermines
personal ambition and the capacity for self help.
• Poverty and entitlements

• Famines happen due to the failure of political

and social arrangements. A country with:

1. No proper or robust democracy

2. No independent and critical press/media

Is prone to inequalities.

• Poverty line is a common measure of the

population below a tolerable standard of living.

• It ignores the level of deprivation among poor.

 Urban Sociology

Lec 18: 06/03/2024

Urban environments

Dr. Amrita Sen

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
email: [email protected]
 2024

Source: Africa Environmental Education and Training Action Plan 2015-2024 (2017, pp. 12)
• According to the UN’s World Commission on
Environment and Development (also known as
Brundtland Commission), the definition of
Sustainable Development is “development that
meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own need” (Our Common Future, 1987).

• United Nations Conference on Environment and

Development in 1992, known as the Earth Summit,
held in Rio De Janeiro. Central focus on
sustainable development.
 Sustainable Society
Sustainable Development

Economic Environmental
Social Equity
Efficiency Responsibility

•Living conditions •Economic growth •Consumption of

•Equal opportunity •Efficiency and resources
•Social cohesion competitiveness •Materials and wastes
•International solidarity •Flexibility and stability •Risks
•Maintenance of •Production / •Rate of change
human capital. consumption •Natural and cultural
•Employment landscape
•International trade
 Foundations of human well-being

Human well-being is supported by three pillars:

• economic conditions and processes
employment, income & wealth (magnitude & distribution), markets,
trade…
• sociopolitical conditions and processes
law & order, national & homeland security, governance, liberty, justice,
equity, education, health care, science, culture & the arts…
• environmental conditions and processes
air, water, soils, mineral resources, the biota, nutrient cycles, climatic
processes…
• In the past, “development” has mainly referred to
strengthening the economic pillar.
• Recently the sociopolitical and environmental pillars have
gotten more attention, but they remain widely
undervalued compared to the economic one.
• In reality, the pillars are co-equal in importance, because:
• each is indispensable,
• and all interconnected.
 URBAN SOCIOLOGY

Lecture 19: 14/03/2024

SMART CITIES, SOCIAL &

ENVIRONMENT
Are Smart Cities Really ‘Smart’?

• Smart City Mission is a flagship program of the Government of India.

• Launched in 2015, the mission seeks to create 100 smart cities across the nation.

• It is an urban renewal and retrofitting program to make cities more sustainable and inclusive.

• No universally accepted definition of ‘Smart City.’

• Mission guidelines state –

“…its aim is to comprehensively develop the urban eco-system comprising of institutional, physical,
social and economic infrastructure… and provide clean and sustainable environment… with a focus
on sustainable and inclusive development.”
-(Government of India, 2015).
Important details of the Smart City Mission

• Proposals are prepared for the selected cities by the State.

• These proposals compete in a nationwide Smart City Challenge.

• To the selected cities, the Centre allocates Rs 500 Crore to each for implementing the projects
selected as Smart City. This amount is matched with a grant of the same amount by the
respective state.

• Each city creates a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) headed by the CEO to implement the project
under the mission. SPVs are based on the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model.

SPV = Local government cooperation with private partners.

• These cities are projected as plan models for other cities to emulate.

• These projects position themselves as growth engines and are endorsed as investor-friendly to
attract national and international capital.

• Development of high-quality infrastructure and infusion of information and communication

technologies (ICTs) are central features to achieve a smart society.

• An important objective of these projects is to produce

sustainable urbanization.

• Sustainable Development Goal 11: “Sustainable Cities

and Communities.”

• To make cities inclusive, safe, and resilient, along with

environmentally sustainable.
• More than half of the urban population lives in informal settlements or slums-
like conditions.

• What implications does a smart city have in this scenario, where half the
population is underprivileged and lives in substandard conditions?

• What implications does smart reformation have on city that is splintered along
different socio-economic lines of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, race, etc.?

• Let’s critically analyze these parameters

• Smart citizenship
• Smart Environment
• Smart Infrastructure
• Smart Governance
• Smart citizenship – smart cities must have and intend to create smart citizens.
• E.g., Smart water meters.

• OXFAM Digital Divide Report 2022

70% of the population has poor or no connectivity to digital services.

Only 38% of households are digitally literate.

Only 31% of the rural population uses the internet as compared to 67% of the urban
population.

• Such solutions will exclude those who are not adequately digitally literate from participating in
urban life. This population will largely comprise people from poor communities.

• Resulting in elitism-centric smart citizenship.

• Smart Environment
• Land is a scarce resource.

• How do we get land for building new cities?

• Smart City projects are of two types- Greenfield and Brownfield

• Greenfield means building a city from scratch. There is no prior existing city. Brownfield
means retrofitting the old one by adding new technology to already present infrastructure.

• Land acquisition from villages in peri-urban areas, which have different and rich ecology.

• E.g., Rajarhat New Town in Kolkata and Kolkata Wetlands, Dholera Smart City on the Gulf of
Khambhat in Gujarat.

• Increase in carbon footprint in such areas due to intensive construction certainly produces
detrimental effects on local ecology.
• Smart Environment
• In brownfield projects

• Large portions of urban land is under slum. Can smart cities co-exist with slums?

• Large portions of the city, both planned and unplanned, still lack basic services such as water
supply, sewage, drainage, etc.

• E.g., of Delhi. Air purifiers and air quality monitoring systems are installed at several points to
combat air pollution.

• Achieving sustainability through smart city concepts without tackling the problem of inequality
is largely elusive.
• Smart Governance
• The Smart City Mission provides provisions for setting up the Integrated Command and
Control Center (ICCC), which provides data-centric solutions to urban challenges.

• They use Big Data for governance and management in the city.

• ICTs have become a crucial way of life.

• Network of ICTs produces floods of data that are dynamic real-

time data sets.

• But data is not apolitical.

• Collected data reproduces the splintered and differentiated reality

of society in terms of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, etc.

• Control & management based on this data inevitably produce

injustice and marginalization.
• Smart Governance
• Public Private Partnerships (PPP)

• Changes the mechanism of how urban local bodies work in the name of efficiency and speedy
work.

• Under the PPP model, the Decision-making of democratically elected urban local bodies is
affected in favor of initiatives that are economically rewarding and popular among affluent
sections.

• This can potentially overlook the needs, participation, and representation of vulnerable sections.
• Smart Infrastructure
• Smart also means quick communication and accessibility.

• This is particularly reflected in transport infrastructure.

• Smart city vision often promotes high-speed corridors, expressways, highways, etc.

• These infrastructures are more approachable and favorable to car owners and overlook the
transportation needs of underprivileged sections, such as pedestrians and those who use cycles
to commute.

• Marginalized large section of society which can not afford private vehicles.

• Also, such kind of infrastructural smartness is contradictory to the sustainability agenda as it

promotes private vehicles contributing to pollution.
Take away…
• Urban problems are multifaceted and interconnected.

• And so can not be reduced to issues of inefficiency or lack of infrastructure.

• Technologically laden policies and solutions hardly produce tangible results to cater
sustainability and reducing social and economic disparity.

• Ideas like Smart City, without being mindful of the ground reality that runs deeper problems of
unequal power and injustices, to a great extent remain utopian, fantasy-like.
References

• Prasad, D. and Alizadeh, T. 2020. What Makes Indian Cities Smart? A Policy Analysis of Smart
Cities Mission. Telematics and Informatics, 55, 101466.

• Hollands, R. G. 2008. Will the real smart city please stand up? City, 12 (3), 303-320

• Kitchin, R. 2014. ‘The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism’. GeoJournal 79, no. 1: 1-14.
 Urban Sociology

Lec 20: 15/03/2024

Urban environments

Dr. Amrita Sen

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
email: [email protected]
• Approach to development that looks to balance different, and often
competing, needs against an awareness of the environmental, social
and economic limitations we face as a society.

• Living within our environmental limits is one of the central principles

of sustainable development. One implication of not doing so is
climate change.

• Sustainable development provides an approach to making better

decisions on the issues that affect all of our lives.

• 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development, was adopted by UN

member states in 2015.

• 17 sustainable development goals.

• Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
• Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
• Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
• Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
• Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
• Goal 6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
• Goal 7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
• Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent
work for all
• Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
• Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries
• Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
• Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
• Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts*
• Goal 14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
• Goal 15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests,
combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
• Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and
build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
IPCC PROJECTIONS ABOUT CITIES