2024/05/15 by Ayona Datta · 1 voice · 4 citations
Social Sciences · #Urban Planning and Governance #Water Governance and Infrastructure
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/20438206241253567
openalex publication_date 2024/05/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/19
Recent geographical scholarship has mainly focussed on the disjunctures between linear and cyclical time in urban development. This paper proposes a notion of distant time as a metaphor of temporal power that keeps marginal citizens at a governable distance from the state. Taking the case of Shimla, an erstwhile Summer Capital of colonial India and a popular tourist town in the Himalayas, it argues that distant time emerges from the temporal reordering of ‘native’ settlement on a fragile ecological landscape ravaged by the colonial state, that is then repeated in postcolonial imaginaries of smart urban futures. Reading ‘along the grain’ of colonial archives of incremental housebuilding by the ‘natives’, as well as interviews with current working class residents of Shimla living under threat of demolition from proposed smart city projects, this paper suggests that distant time is also a space for marginal citizens to claim temporal justice. Even as the state engages in temporal distancing through post/colonial planning, marginal citizens use waiting, confusing, and circumventing as tools of temporal arbitrage. They highlight that aspirations for smart urban futures are not just produced in the ‘here and now’ of the present, but also from the ‘there and then’ of different pasts and futures.