about the regions
Three municipalities in the peripheries of metropolitan cities across India, Kenya and Mexico have been selected – Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), India; Nairobi Metropolitan Region (NMR), Kenya; and Guadalajara Metropolitan region (GMR), Mexico.
The three regions have been chosen as large metropolitan agglomerations that are part of longstanding national e-governance programmes, which have recently intensified towards automating urbanisation in their peripheries. All three regions are marked by histories of colonisation, uneven development and a fragmented ‘digital revolution’ in local governments and thus present important case studies of local governance within ‘digitalising states’ at various levels of articulation. All three regions also have strategic regional plans in place for urbanising its peripheral regions particularly municipalities which hold mainly agricultural and industrial economies. These will produce for the first time, a comparative reading across the global south of rapidly digitalising and urbanising regions — both as exemplary and paradigmatic sites of digitalisation-as-urbanisation.
INDIA
We will examine a peripheral municipality of Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) that has been bypassed repeatedly by national urban development programmes. We will explore how the municipality has embarked on a full digitalisation programme in line with the national ‘Digital India’ initiative to create its first ‘Strategic Masterplan’ that seeks to incorporate all its informal settlements and neighbouring villages within its development plan. We will examine the challenges this has already presented to municipal officials with low digital capacity charged with digitisation of paper documents to produce strategic spatial and land use planning frameworks.
kenya
We will produce an exemplar case study of a rapidly digitalising peripheral municipality of Nairobi Metropolitan Region (NMR), where the dynamics of digitalisation-as-urbanisation is visible on paper yet entangled with the complex paper legacies of colonial governance and its disruptions by a digitalising state. Since February of 2019, through a national initiative established by Kenya’s President it has sought to update and digitalise municipal maps and cadastral plans to develop new digital geospatial maps and standardise urban digitalisation processes.
We will examine how peripheral counties have become affected by complex administrative challenges of digitalisation, including information errors in current land registry maps, poor storage and archiving of cadastral maps and land titles.
MEXICO
We will examine a peripheral municipality of Guadalajara Metropolitan Region (GMR) which has embraced the national digitalisation programme (Estrategia Digital Nacional) and was selected for the IBM Smarter cities challenge in 2014. But digitalisation of its peripheries has been uneven and contested, with a central unsurmountable challenge of invisibility of its territories on paper and digital information infrastructures.
We will examine how this forms the basis of several municipal development plans and a metropolitan strategic plan (Programa de ordenamiento metropolitano del Área Metropolitana de Guadalajara).