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

Smart as a City examines the intersection of hardware, software, and the built environment to provide a rich ethnographic investigation into how smartness is received and negotiated by different groups 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. Providing a novel glimpse into an actually existing smart city, Baykurt redefines smartness as a collective effort to spotlight a city's enduring problems and to align local issues with the often-buggy, partially developed systems offered by tech companies. She shows that the success of matching civic concerns with flawed tech systems is hard won and ambiguous, and that the techniques of data capitalism extract rather than solve urban inequalities.