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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.
BOOK TALKS
Brownbag seminar at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town on June 9, 2026.
A Book Release Day Talk hosted by the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota on May 5, 2026.
Book Launch & Panel at UMass Amherst in conversation with Sareeta Amrute, Jonathan Corpus Ong, and Timothy Pachirat on April 27, 2026.
Information Systems Seminar Series at DeGroote School of Business of McMaster University, April 14, 2026.
New Civic Terrains Lecture Series at Northeastern University, February 26, 2026.