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Available From UC Press
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.
Burcu Baykurt is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and coeditor of Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order.
"In Smart as a City, Burcu Baykurt deftly shows that high-tech city strategies, like Google's grand ambitions for Kansas City, actually enhance ignorance, waste precious resources, and disappoint a hopeful public. The careful research in this book reveals that instead of falling in line for shiny new urban wares, citizen groups and policymakers should persist in the often difficult but proven efforts that help people get housing, jobs, and access to decent schools."—Harvey Molotch, coauthor of Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place"Baykurt's ethnography crackles with insight, exposing how flashy 'innovation' and hollow promises of reinvention often sideline community wisdom and the real sources of urban inequity. This book is a stirring reminder that lasting justice requires valuing the people who understand their cities from the ground up."—Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology and Imagination: A Manifesto"Vivid and beautifully written, Smart as a City forces us to reckon with the fact that techno-utopian imaginaries of test-bed urbanism, while speculative, are never ephemeral. They function as traps in which people must negotiate inequitable lives while political alternatives are quelled. Baykurt reminds us that the hunt for high-tech fixes will endure so long as cities remain unequal."—Sarah Sharma, author of Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech