Smart Jalandhar
From Emigration city to healthy city
This Storymap is part of our wider research project on Learning from Small Cities , and reports on Jalandhar, India.
Jalandhar is a city of more than 800,000 people in the north-western Indian state of Punjab, only 100 kilometers from the international border with Pakistan. Jalandhar is known as a trade and manufacturing hub for sports goods and machinery, and is currently in economic decline.
100 Smart Cities of India
The inclusion of Jalandhar into India's 100 Smart City Mission marks a crucial moment in the city's efforts to reinvigorate it's cultural and industrial sectors. In this StoryMap we present the Lessons from Jalandhar through the themes of imagining, governing, and living urban futures.
Introduction
Growth of the City
The theme of emigration dominates the narrative of Jalandhar: its wealth based on agriculture and manufacturing drew people into the city from other Indian states and the rural hinterland; and its more recent economic decline has seen thousands now moving out to countries abroad, predominantly Canada and the UK. One of India's highest emigration rates is from Jalandhar district where almost every family has someone who has migrated or is trying to migrate overseas.
"The once swaggering sports, leather and hand tool makers are now limping along, bruised by Chinese competition, and stifling domestic policies. Canadian, British and US NRIs, whose money and pursuit of “status” powered Jalandhar’s boom, are now cutting off their umbilical cord with Punjab.” --- The Quint (Jan, 2019)
The following maps show key demographic changes such as population densities and growth, sex ratios, literacy and employment in the city between the 2001 and 2011 census.
Population
As well as changes to the distribution of the population between and (click to change map), the google earth imagery here shows an increase in built up land in urban areas.
Jalandhar Population (Source: data.gov.in)
Sex Ratio
This map and the graph below show an increase in the ratio of females to males between and (click to show on map). This could be attributed to improved access to healthcare. Hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and doctors are marked here for reference (source: openstreetmap)
Jalandhar Sex Ratio (Source: data.gov.in)
Schools and Colleges (Literacy)
This map shows an increase in literacy in every electoral ward and across the state from to (click to show on map). This can be attributed to better access to education. Schools, colleges and universities are marked on the map (data source: openstreetmap).
Jalandhar Literacy (Source: data.gov.in)
Disclaimer: openstreetmap data is collected by volunteers and therefore this is possibly not a complete list of schools and colleges. E.g. Privately funded schools which may not be represented here.
Unemployment (Non-Workers)
This map shows the percentage of the population, by ward, classified as non-workers in the and census (click to show on map).
Jalandhar Population classed as 'non-worker'. (Source: data.gov.in)
Non-workers constitute those who did not participate in any economic activity, paid or unpaid, including students; those attending to daily household chores like cooking, cleaning utensils, looking after children, fetching water etc. and are not even helping in the unpaid work in the family farm or cultivation or milching; dependants such as infants; very elderly people not included in the category of worker; those who are drawing pension after retirement and are not engaged in any economic activity; beggars, vagrants, prostitutes and persons having unidentified source of income and with unspecified sources of subsistence and not engaged in any economically productive work during the reference period.
Non-workers also include those who may not come under the above categories such as rentiers, persons living on remittances, agricultural or non-agricultural royalty, convicts in jails or inmates of penal, mental or charitable institutions doing no paid or unpaid work and persons who are seeking/available for work.
Disclaimer: As in the case of many other small cities, the availability of data and possibility of analysis is hindered by frequent changes to the administrative geographies of these places. Changes to Sub-municipal boundaries are likely to have been arranged and re-arranged, changing the total number of wards in the city, their distribution , and the number of elected representatives in the municipal assembly. This also means that the Census data is not comparable over time across these shifting geographical and administrative units.
Socio-economic transformations
Wireless Data Connectivity
This map visualises wireless data availability across the city. The heatmap shows the strength of wireless signal available. You can also see the location of mobile towers throughout the city. Click on on the spot icons to reveal details of the kinds of devices people are using.
Percent of users using each mobile operator (source: nPerf)
Parks and Greenspaces
Parks and greenspaces account for 14 percent of land within the Jalandhar municipal boundaries. , which has 70 acres of recreational green space and is used regularly by a wide cross-section of people, is the proposed site of a high-profile sports hub development as part of the smart city development plan.
Click on the interactive timeline below to read more on Jalandhar's urban transformations
Jalandhar timeline of urban transformations. Curated by Varun Patil.
Imagining a smart future
100 Smart Cities of India
Smart Cities Mission
In 2017, Jalandhar was inducted into the Smart Cities Mission of the Union Ministry for Urban Development. This mission sought to create 100 new smart cities in India with a focus on smaller second-tier cities. Jalandhar's bid for inclusion became successful during the third round of competitive funding allocations. The Jalandhar smart city proposal focuses on a few strategic areas that are illustrated in the following presentation.
Jalandhar's Smart City Projects
Governing the smart city
The Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) formed by the winning municipality is the central actor co-coordinating with all other institutional actors to plan and execute the projects. However the actual set of institutions and flow of power differs in each city due to the diverse and complex political and institutional landscape in India.
Click on the interactive Organogram of Jalandhar Smart City Mission below to read more about the various roles.
Organogram of Jalandhar urban governance. Curated by Varun Patil. Designed by RF Design .
“Smart city has revived the dead Corporations. We used to do cyclostyle (duplicate, replicate) work until now, like road, sewer, street lights. The Prime Minister's vision helps us exit that mentality….Think not merely of the present but of the future in 25-30 years” [Ex-Mayor Mr Sunil Jyoti, 2017]
Living the future city
"This is what we miss when living in a city. This is what our cities lack....the oxygen, the greenery....it's what we find in abundance in Burlton Park." [Male, 45years, morning walker]
Vignettes from Burlton Park. Photos: Rohit Madan (CC BY-NC-SA)
Community Asset Mapping (CAM)
We adopted a community oriented asset-based approach to understand how people relate to Burlton Park and Jyoti Chowk and the tangible and intangible assets identified by participants.
Map My Assets
Participants were asked to take photographs using a bespoke smartphone app and record short audio reflections. This maps shows those records.
Explore participants' reflections on Burlton Park by toggling the themes below to see photographs, hear audio recordings, and read transcripts.
Community Asset Mapping (CAM) at Burlton Park
How do the middle classes perceive urban transformations sought by the smart city mission? To understand this all important question the research team held a community asset mapping workshop at Burlton Park, the vast open green area in Jalandhar on the evening of August 12th.
Observations
Three important observations emerged across the two groups:
- The most important assets at the park were seen as intangible, an important point which administrations and policy makers seem to miss out while taking into account assets affected by urban transformations.
- They saw their carefully curated space as being under constant threat from not only the municipality but also due to the ‘loose’ character of Burlton Park.
- Despite their battles with the state they were very careful not to be seen as anti-development and held out development as a ‘common good for all’.
Insights
Two strong themes emerged:
- First most participants agreed that more education was required to transform into a smart city.
- Second participants were critical of retro-fitting; most participants felt that old areas cannot be developed to make them smart.
Vignettes of Jyoti Chowk and Rainik Bazaar. Photos: Rohit Madan (CC BY-NC-SA)
Community Asset Mapping: Jyoti Chowk and Rainik Bazaar
Map My Assets
Explore particpants' reflections on Jyoti Chowk. Toggle the themes below, and click the map icons to see photographs, hear audio recordings, and read transcripts.
Community Asset Mapping (CAM) at Jyoti Chowk
How do the vendors and traders in bazaars, a vital population in our cities, perceive urban transformations sought by the smart city mission? To answer this the research team held a workshop at the Kali Mandir in Jyoti Chowk market area on August 17th, 2019 .
Retro-fitting
In sharp contrast to Burlton Park, the vendors strongly argued for the logic of retro-fitting; making the existing city smart rather than tearing it down and remaking it.
"India is not being made, it already is made. The cities we got (after independence) were already made, we can’t destroy them. We should combine the old and new elements" [vendor]
Becoming Smart
"It is not like we don’t want to become smart, earlier used to use multiple ordinary phones but as the situation got updated now we are using smart phones. If these shops look like shacks it is not because we have not tried. Being a vulnerable vendor is not a conscious choice" [vendor]
Lessons from Jalandhar
The following are some short reflections and lessons learnt from Jalandhar.
Animation: Learning from Small Cities - Jalandhar
Global Economy versus Everyday Local Economies
Photo: Rohit Madan (CC BY-NC-SA)
In Jalandhar a significant aspect of the smart city proposal rests upon upgrading existing industrial capacity in manufacturing and the sale of sports goods. This speaks to SDG target 8.2 , to, “achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading, and innovation”. Jalandhar's Smart City ambitions to become a ‘Global hub for sports and manufacturing’, rest upon the redevelopment of Burlton Park into a sports hub. However, groups that currently use the park, representing a cross-section of class, caste, and gender, expressed anxiety of losing green cover in the area.
Meanwhile, the already existing, everyday economy of the city, is being disrupted to make space for Smart City regeneration projects such as the smart junction at Valmiki Chowk. Our CAM participants at the chowk told us how essential the space is to their livelihoods and a space of community anchored by informal unions and longstanding trade relations. The UN’s Habitat III New Urban Agenda emphasises the importance of supporting informal economies just like the street traders at Valmiki Chowk. Despite this, community members told us that they have faced displacements, evictions, and protracted legal battles because of Smart City development.
Photo: Rohit Madan (CC BY-NC-SA)
Heritage versus Intangible Assets
Both the Burlton Park and Valmiki Chowk groups that participated in our CAM workshops expressed deep connections to their respective sites. The Valmiki Chowk group explained how essential the space was to their livelihoods but also expressed the importance of intangible assets like community traditions and identity. Relatedly, users of Burlton Park see it as a key asset in their everyday lives, essential to recreation and social reproduction, and important the to the city’s cultural heritage. The Jalandhar Smart City proposal looks to drastically reconfigure these two sites, and as such threatens access to valuable assets, and deep connections to place and community. This is not to say that these communities are entirely against the Smart City developments. Participants in our CAM workshop at Valmiki Chowk were hopeful that Smart City improvements would lead to safer and more reliable water and electricity, better sanitation, and improved infrastructure. At Burlton Park, participants lamented the fact that their park had come to be seen as a potential source of revenue for the cash-strapped municipality, but were also optimistic that the development would lead to improved street lighting, sports facilities, and maintenance of parks, along with an improved sense of safety and security, social cohesion, better relations with the municipal corporation, and a mutually beneficial co-existence with the sports hub.
Relations between both communities and the municipal corporation could be improved with the implementation of better community consultation by Smart City planners and more sophisticated understanding of the value of such spaces in terms of their cultural history.
Environment versus Local Ecologies
In the Jalandhar Smart City Proposal, the environment is discussed in terms of visual improvement, (e.g. tidying up and paving streets), safety (improving CCTV and streetlight coverage), accessibility, and air quality. The proposal claims there will be 9% in CO2 emission and 14% in Nox with the development of the new public transportation system (in line with the SDG target 9.4 to upgrade and retrofit infrastructure and industries to make them more sustainable).
Photo: Rohit Madan (CC BY-NC-SA)
However, in our CAM workshop at Burlton Park, discussions of environment tended to focus more on the advantage of having access to open greenspace and the clean air provided by the park. Parks and open green space within Jalandhar's municipal boundary account for only 14% of urban space. Plans to develop parts the Burlton Park site into a sports hub risks a loss of this scarce resource for communities using the park. Here, efforts to drive economic growth (addressing SDG target 8.2 ) potentially undermines target 11.7 which aims to, “provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces”.
Smart City versus Connected Infrastructure
In smart city projects, ‘smartness’ is often apprehended as the (retro)fitting of digital technologies in the form of sensor rich and computerised systems for security, traffic management, refuse processing, water and sewerage management, centralisation of city operations, and so on. It is marketed as a digital age upgrade to analogue, inefficient urban infrastructure. At face value these projects seem to align with SDG targets that encourage technological upgrading ( see 8.2 ) and increasing access to information ( see 9c ). However, often this framing fails to properly recognise the digital waves that have already permeated urban space, not in the form of Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCC) or Smart Bus stops, but in the availability of low-cost smartphones and the ubiquity of mobile data.
Jalandhar's pan-city development includes the upgrading of 11 traffic junctions to smart junctions, incorporating city surveillance systems, congestion easing, and an integrated command and control centre (ICCC). This kind pan-city infrastructure retrofitting and upgrading project speaks directly to SDG 9.4.
One of the junctions marked for upgrade is Valmiki (Jyoti) Chowk, the densest traffic junction in the city. It is adjacent to the busy commercial area of Rainik Bazaar, also marked for redevelopment. Vendors here reported a lack engagement with Smart City plans (i.e. vendors did not know about the redevelopment of the chowk) but conveyed that a history of struggling against evictions has shaped their lived experiences and perceptions. Plans to improve city infrastructure should better take into consideration the livelihoods of those engaged in informal economies.
When asked about their engagement with smart technologies, some interview respondents at Valmiki Chowk reported high smartphone usage amongst their peers, some using PayTM to take payments and access financial services. However, another explained how a lot of people in Jalandhar are too poor to take advantage of such services offered via smartphone, and that this fact would hinder the city’s ability to ‘become smart’.
Further resources
If you enjoyed interacting with this Storymap, please check out our other Storymaps on Nashik and Shimla below.
