Smart as a City

Smart as a City provides a rich ethnographic investigation into how smartness is received and negotiated by different groups in a midsize US city, examining the intersection of hardware, software, and the built environment. 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 pilots 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 often 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 co-editor of Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order.