Zeroville-on-Khambhat, or: the clean slate's cost

In this reflection on Ayona Datta’s article on ‘New Urban Utopias’, I consider the specific ideological work the notion of the ‘smart city’ does when transplanted onto Indian soil as the development project of Dholera. I explore how the desire on the part of Dholera’s promoters to sanitize the site’s history, and efface the legacy of displacements and expulsions on which the planned megacity will be built, parallels a collective desire for forgetting on the part of Gujarat, Narendra Modi (then Gujarati Chief Minister and now Indian Prime Minister) and the nation itself.