The three modes of existence of the pandemic smart city

Working on the provincialisation of the smart city in South Africa and India, the members of our research team recently witnessed, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the five countries in which we live and work, the emergence of a ‘pandemic smart city’. Technologies, institutions, organisations and people we were observing and working with were repurposed, reshaped or reoriented in efforts to manage and mitigate the public health crisis. Drawing on work on ontological pluralism and on postcolonial urban studies, this introductory piece and the articles in this special issue argue that the management of the pandemic in cities of the Global South is closely intertwined with the three modes of existence of the smart city: the state-led, corporate-led and citizen-led smart city.