Amaravati City: progress on a new Indian capital in the age of smart global cities

Abstract

After years of political discord, protest and political maneuvering, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh split into two separate entities: one of these new states kept the capital city of Hyderabad and took the name Telangana. The second maintained the name of the pre-separation state but was left without a capital. The paper examines the founding of this new city, Amaravati, for the state of Andhra Pradesh and looks at the influence of global city discourses on the framing of its development: from policy decisions, international partnerships and its administrative structure to the language used to describe these decisions to diverse constituencies. More specifically, the paper will focus on how the governing body charged with developing the new administrative region has deployed descriptions of a ‘smart-city’ to introduce technological initiatives that promote a specific set of goals, i.e. transparency, efficiency, accessibility. These initiatives include the use of a block-chain registration system for the transfer of land rights, an open-platform GIS mapping database, and collaboration with a Singaporean engineering firm to design and execute an integrated infrastructural network. The paper will look at how these new technologies frame ongoing development and assess their relevance for the specific challenges and context of the new capital. The paper will also describe a methodology for the ongoing tracking of Amaravati that will record its spatial development and put its transformation in relation with the negotiated social, political and economic decisions that inform it.