Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism

Smart as a City provides a rich ethnographic investigation into how smartness is received and negotiated in a midsize US city. Burcu Baykurt follows the work of civic entrepreneurs, local residents, and city officials in Kansas City, Missouri, where Google tested a citywide gigabit service and the local government launched a series of smart city pilot projects in transportation, public housing, and municipal services. Baykurt redefines smartness as a collective effort to spotlight a city’s enduring local problems and align solutions with the often buggy, partially developed systems offered by tech companies. She shows that success in matching civic concerns with flawed tech systems is hard-won and ambiguous, and that the techniques of data capitalism extract value from urban inequalities rather than solve them. Read more