Smart Cities

Firstly, a smart city should be built on mutual transactions, mutual consent. So you need 100% consent and agreement from the farmers for the land you want to buy. If you say only 70% of the farmers need to agree, then you are stealing from the other 30%. A system of land acquisition is fascism, it's tyranny, it's a system of violence, and coercion which is fundamentally evil. You are cutting off your arm to sell and buy a diamond ring for your other hand.

In theory, when a developer wants to buy land from a farmer to build whatever he wants, the transaction is such that a rich man is coming to a poor man to make an exchange. To the rich man, the land is more valuable to him than the cash he has on hand, because he sees the future potential of that land. To the farmer, he also sees value in the land but may be willing to give up the land if he is given enough money to buy the same amount of land elsewhere, and of similar quality. For example, land in Bengal produces more crops on 1 acre than 1 acre in Rajasthan. So both sides are trying to get emerge from the exchange in a better position than where they were previously.

Ultimately the developer will have to fork over a good sum of money, and quilt together farmlands that he is able to come to an agreement on. And that is good, because suddenly these farmers who were poor, will now become richer on their own terms.

If you simply snatch the land from farmers and then "compensate" them, you actually run the risk of impoverishing the poor and making the developers rich off what is essentially theft. And once you legalize theft, you will have an efficient machine built to thieve everyone in India, which I believe will inevitably lead to Civil War.

Smart cities are these fortified enclaves that seeks to create a sanitized space for itself. It's a planned community, and in reality it's a governance structure where the government is a private. It's a voluntary autocracy, or dictatorship. In other words, if the dictatorship becomes too oppressive for your liking, you can simply leave, there is no Berlin Wall. Because of that, it is forced to attract people, and ensure a degree of freedom so people don't feel as though they are in a state of consensual oppression. People do want orderliness, and the want the ability to create a series of rules and regulations that everyone agrees to before they move in.

There a vibrancy though in unregulated Indian villages, slums, and cities, and indeed an efficiency that I don't believe you can recreate in a planned society. I think people living in these sanitized communities will realize they want this vibrancy, and will want to imitate it, but it could never truly match the real thing. Eventually the cost will be so high to maintain these communities, that it won't be able to accommodate everyone, only those people who are rich enough to afford it.

Even in the most anarchic of Indian cities, there is an efficiency that can out-compete any kind planned city. Slums are the most extreme example of that. What makes it unappealing is that they are lacking in resources. But they are hives of all kinds of different activities, they are an organic unit. Gradually as their wealth increases little by little, so will their surroundings, and their vibrancy will remain. All these picturesque European towns that people vacation in started out that way. It takes time to culture, to mature, to ripen, like any fine wine.

In a sense planned cities could be a good idea if they were self sustaining, so all of the waste products need to be contained on site and reused so that the system is circular. That means all the poop, the pee, the paper, the food waste, need to be re-used for something within the society. It can't all just be dumped outside of the gated grounds.