What does it mean for a city to be “smart”? Smart as a City 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.
About the speakers
Burcu Baykurt is 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 author of Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism and coeditor of Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order.
Jacqueline Lu advances technology transparency and legibility for people-centered smart(er) cities. She leads Helpful Places, a social impact enterprise advancing the adoption and stewardship of Digital Trust for Places and Routines (DTPR.io), an open-source visual language standard designed to increase transparency and legibility of the use of data, sensors and AI in the built environment. DTPR has been recognized in the American Planning Association’s 2023 Trend Report, and featured in publications such as Cities Today and Thomson Reuter’s Context. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Data Equity, Council for the Connected World and a working group member and contributor to the G20 Smart Cities Alliance.
