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. 
This event is in partnership with the Urban Tech Collective (UTC) at the University of Michigan’s Digital Studies Institute. UTC convenes U-M faculty and students from various disciplines investigating the imaginaries, design, and use of digital technologies within urban everyday life. UTC investigates topics related to physical and digital spaces; mediated representations of urban space and urban communities; digital rights and inequalities; datafication; urban intelligences; and social change. The collective meets throughout the academic year to share research, methodologies, and best practices for the study of technology and urban life, to host speakers, and reimagine the role of urban technology scholarship, design, and policy in affecting more equitable, sustainable futures.The DSI Reading Room is a conversation series featuring new books by Digital Studies Institute faculty and guest authors. Through public discussions, we explore emerging scholarship and the ideas shaping technology, culture, media, and society. 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 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.We strive to make our events accessible to all participants. This event will be a hybrid event with both a physical meeting space and an online meeting space.
CART will be provided. If you anticipate needing accommodations to participate, please email Eric Mancini at [email protected]. Please note that some accommodations must be arranged in advance, and we encourage you to contact us as soon as possible.