New Civic Terrains: "Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism"

This talk examines how the global project of “smart urbanism” takes shape through the uneven infrastructures, racialized histories, and austerity politics of an American city. Drawing on ethnographic research in Kansas City, Missouri, where municipal leaders partnered with Google and Cisco and launched several urban-tech pilots, the talk reframes smartness as a collective effort to spotlight enduring local problems and align them with the often-buggy, partially developed systems offered by tech companies. I argue that urban disparities are not an unintended consequence of the smart city; they are the foundation upon which it is built. 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 talk conceptualizes test-bed urbanism as a mode of local governance that works through civic aspiration, deliberate ignorance, and municipal politics.

The New Civic Terrains Speaker Series convenes public conversations with thinkers and practitioners working at the frontiers of digital civic life. Through lecture and dialogue, the series highlights diverse ways of knowing and making, from empirical research and policy critique to creative practice and grassroots organizing. The series creates a collective opportunity for reflection, debate, and collaboration, fostering cross-disciplinary exchange and inviting audiences to imagine new civic imaginaries for a technologically mediated world.

The Digital Civics Initiative at Northeastern University is an interdisciplinary platform dedicated to understanding and reshaping the civic dimensions of digital technologies in contemporary life. The initiative brings together scholars, educators, activists, technologists, and artists whose work engages questions of technology and education, labor and automation, governance and public institutions, surveillance and data justice, environmental sustainability, community organizing, and human-centered approaches to machine learning and artificial intelligence.

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Ryder Hall: Center for Design, 11 Leon Street, Boston, United States

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