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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Songdo, South Korea, is one of the earliest and most ambitious smart city projects. Mythical narratives have painted it as a promised land of the future where the problems and struggles of the present have been efficiently transcended—or concealed—by technology. In City in a Future Tense, Chamee Yang interrogates these myths and traces Songdo's story to show how it emerged out of a complex interplay of governmental rationality, cultural aspirations, and collective anxiety about the future. Drawing on Korea's developmental past and relentless drive toward a technological future, visions of freedom, security, and connectivity converged with new techniques of governance to shape a distinctive urban form. By challenging the reduction of the smart city to a mere government policy, stage of capitalism, or ready-made solution to urban problems, Yang offers a new way of understanding the smart city as the contingent outcome of multiple, competing futures—a reality that is still pending.
Chamee Yang is Assistant Professor of Communication at Seoul National University.
"City in a Future Tense transports readers to the iconic smart city of Songdo, where Chamee Yang provides an insightful analysis of how technology-infused urbanization takes shape through social worlds and imaginaries."—Jennifer Gabrys, Chair in Media, Culture and Environment, University of Cambridge
"An innovative and critical intervention into the study of smart cities and ideas of 'the nation.' The book advances the original concept of 'developmentality' to show how smart city formation operates not through top-down imposition but through the cultural production of future-oriented national imaginaries. Spanning four decades of archival research and fieldwork, Yang moves beyond familiar critiques of platform capitalism and smart cities to reveal how collective aspirations, anxieties, and techno-nationalist mythologies are the real infrastructures undergirding smart urbanism."—Orit Halpern, coauthor of The Smartness Mandate