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Despite the bourgeoning of smart city initiatives across the Global South, their implementation and place-based outcomes remain understudied. This paper presents empirical studies in three Indian cities of Bhubaneswar, Pune and Chennai; three of the first 20 smart cities prioritized for implementation in the Smart Cities Mission. It investigates the place-based outcomes utilized to create smart cities under three categories of mega-, placemaking, and lighthouse projects. The results show varying levels of urban interventions contributing to 'bubble urbanism' – a fragmented combination of large-scale mega-projects and small-scale revitalization projects – with complex socio-spatial implications for smart city development in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate governance studies suggest that the way climate risk and vulnerability are conceptualized, defined, and managed has consequences for people and places. In this paper, we analyze how different climate risk discourses and their vulnerability portrayals are constructed and have evolved in Bhubaneswar city in India. We conduct a Critical Discourse Analysis of various climate action plans and policy documents, as well as a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews to interpret their discursive positions on climate issues. Based on our findings, we highlight three main discourses through which risk is constructed – discourses of inevitability, collocation, and intrinsic necessity. The vulnerability portrayals across these discourses are undergoing a transition from a pure outcome vulnerability approach toward a context-based approach, while their framings range from vulnerability to events, places, and social groups. The intertwining of discursive constructions of risk and vulnerability contributes toward constantly forming and re-forming risk and governance objects (and subjects), and the reproduction and resistance to certain forms of knowledge that limit and enable governance responses to climate change at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]