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

What does it mean for a city to be “smart”? Burcu Baykurt will present her latest book Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Kansas City, Missouri, where Google piloted a citywide gigabit network and city officials launched several smart city projects in the 2010s. Through cases including public-housing residents’ quiet refusal of “free” gigabit internet, the city’s turn to predictive analytics that largely confirmed the obvious, and public–private strategies for managing failure without naming it, the book reframes test-bed urbanism as a mode of local governance that works through civic aspiration, deliberate ignorance, and municipal politics. It argues that urban disparities are not an unintended consequence of the smart city; they are the foundation upon which it is built.

Burcu Baykurt is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research explores how digital infrastructures reshape and perpetuate urban inequalities. She is the coeditor of Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order.