Gendering the smart city: A subaltern curation network on Gender Based Violence (GBV) in India

This two-year research network interweaves urban studies, feminist geography and digital humanities to critically engage with the smart city agenda on women's safety and gender based violence (GBV). It is timely and innovative in approach by bringing together a multidisciplinary collective of feminist and urban geographers, ICT initiatives, feminist NGOs and media artists from UK and India. It shifts the debates around smart urban futures in the global north by focusing on highly marginalized and invisible subaltern citizens of the global south - GBV survivors living in slums and informal settlements of Delhi and Bengaluru. It identifies and addresses the faultlines in current smart city agendas, which seek to resolve key societal challenges of GBV through the technocratic rationality of crowdsourced safety apps.

This network draws upon urban studies debates to move away from a 'one size fits all' (Kitchin 2015) critique to examine the diversity of 'actually existing smart cities' (Shelton et. al. 2014) in India. It draws upon feminist geography debates on GBV as 'a form of political, institutional and economic violence' (McIllwaine 2013, 66) and combines the liminality of cyberspace with that of everyday corporeality (Madge and O'Connor 2005) to enable an embodied and gendered approach to the smart city. It uses digital humanities methods to develop the notion of a 'data body' (Critical Art Ensemble 1995) - a virtual entity that is unencumbered by the real and imagined boundaries which structure and control women's everyday experiences with GBV.

The network activities will be delivered through two city stakeholder workshops in Delhi and Bengaluru which will share knowledge, build capacity and explore how their smart city agendas of creating safe and sustainable cities can be gendered through the voices, experiences and digital practices of GBV survivors. In particular, each workshop will explore how the existing big data on GBV collected from different sources can be creatively curated. The focus of each workshop will be an interactive digital installation on the gender smart city, co-produced by digital artists and GBV survivors. The network will culminate in a symposium and exhibition in London to foster long-term international collaborations on gendering the smart city across UK and India.

Through these activities, the network will answer three research questions.
1: How are smart city agendas addressing challenges of safe cities? We will examine smart city visions, policies, projects and technologies of Delhi and Bengaluru to understand how they aim to address GBV across public and private spaces and deliver on NUA and SDG goals on Gender Equality and New Technologies.

2: What are the 'hotspots' and 'blindspots' of gendered big data on GBV? We will work with our societal partner, to examine the social and spatial unevenness of the gendered big data in their Safetipin app. This currently stands at crowdsourced safety audits of over 50,000 geolocations in Delhi and 10,000 in Bengaluru. We will focus particularly on the invisibility of this data in slums and informal settlements in both cities. in order to understand the reasons behind this we will engage with a range of stakeholders from smart city experts, law enforcement to grassroots GBV organisations.

3: How can the data-driven smart city be gendered by GBV survivors? Through our networks in NGOs we will work with GBV survivors in slums by using digital humanities methods (such as networked narratives, garment testimonials, campaign hashtags and augmented mapping) to build specific capabilities for freedom as fundamental rights of all citizens (Nussbaum 2006).

The network outcomes will include a project website for knowledge exchange supported by regular social media engagements. Academic outputs include a special issue in a high-impact refereed journal and the development of long term collaborations through a larger research grant application.

This project lies at the intersection of a number of UN policies on ICT4development, SDG and NUA commitments, Safer Cities (See ODA compliance statement) and its main beneficiaries are GBV survivors in informal settlements. It seeks engagement with five distinct communities of interest, namely: 1). Inter/Government departments/agencies, 2). third-sector organisations, 3). ICT and Cultural industries; 4) Built environment professionals and 5) GBV survivors. Each of these communities is directly involved and impacted by the research project either through informing the design, delivery and involvement in the city workshops and/or in the production of the digital art installation.

1) Inter/Government depts. and agencies (UN Women, Delhi Women and Child Development; Delhi Commissioner for Women; Karnataka State Commission for Women): Stakeholders in this group often see GBV survivors at best as passive victims worthy of state policy and interventions and at worst as those complicit in their own experience of GBV. The smart city agenda has reinforced this through the use of crowdsourced digital technology as a means to address GBV and create safe cities, which has sidelined key challenges in institutional forms of victim blaming. The workshops will provide a space to these stakeholders to debate and confront in a mutually respectful environment, the diversity of ways to address GBV within the smart city agenda.

2) Third sector organisations, grassroots collectives and NGOs working with GBV survivors (Jagori; Sangat South Asian Feminist network; Breakthrough, Vimochana): The network will provide a way to connect to other stakeholders through the workshops and the digital installations. It will provide a space for collaboration, knowledge exchange, advocacy and policy influence in addressing GBV.

3) ICT and Creative industries (Safetipin, Revue, Blank Noise): the network will include them as multidisciplinary collaborators, leading on various aspects of the pathways to impact (see document). Their involvement will bring arts and humanities approaches to work with ICT to shift societal perceptions on GBV. The network will also provide them with information on the disconnect between the nature of gendered big data on GBV and the actually existing experiences and complexities of GBV in public and private spaces. It will provide a multidisciplinary space and platform to address complex global problems of GBV through creative practice.

4) Built environment professionals, architects and planners will find the network useful as a way to understand the scope and limitations of design in creating safe cities. There is a common assumption within this sector that crime prevention in the context of GBV is a design problem, hence solutions from this sector has tended to propose street lighting, placemaking, public toilets and so on as pathways to reducing GBV. The network will highlight the interdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach required to address GBV in both private and public spaces, where design is only one aspect of a complex array of forces required to tackle GBV. It will provide a space to confront and debate the role of design of smart cities in shifting societal attitudes towards GBV.

5) GBV survivors: the network will provide ethical and confidential space to GBV survivors to speak in their own voice, claim agency and transform their identity from victimhood to rights claiming citizens. It will provide a supportive and confidential environment to work with digital technology and art to co-create installations that will give confidence and creative agency to claim a gendered right to the smart city. It will also provide them the opportunity to participate in the supportive environment of the stakeholder workshops to draw attention to the complex temporal and spatial marginalisations that frame their experiences in the future smart city.