Smart as a City

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What does it mean for a city to be “smart”? Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism 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. 

“Baykurt’s ethnography crackles with insight, exposing how flashy ‘innovation’ and hollow promises of reinvention often sideline community wisdom. 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, reminding 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

“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

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