Smart cities, smart borders. Sensing networks and security in the urban space

In the outskirts of Kolkata, West Bengal, a satellite township called Rajarhat New Town is being transformed into a smart city, as part of the ‘100 Smart Cities’ programme launched by the Indian government in 2015. The township was originally designed, about thirty years ago, as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) for the IT industry but resulted into a paradoxical space where corporate enclaves and slums, upscale hotels and unfinished constructions uneasily coexist. The projects for New Town reiterate the narrative, crafted by major commercial players, of smart cities as smoothly interconnected systems, and promise that the extensive distribution of computing technologies will turn this urban purgatory into an efficient and harmonic environment. This chapter deconstructs this storyline and draws attention to the ways in which processes of digitalization entail the distribution of border technologies across the urban space. I also discuss how these bordering processes might be constitutive of distinct politics of knowledge and aesthetic, as well as of new techniques of security and urban government.