ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the highly capitalized and corporatized version of the smart city vision, which is in the process of colonizing urban environments and capturing political imaginations of elite decision-makers. Most models and visions of the smart city—whether emanating from academia or media, government or business—tend to revolve around an arsenal of smart technologies. Proponents of the smart city tend to assert that cities must establish new models of governance that are updated for the 21st century. Stephen Goldsmith, a Harvard professor and former mayor, exemplifies this neoliberal boosterism. The collection, exchange, and use of data have become a central element of increasingly more sectors of contemporary political economy. The data imperative can also be seen in the proliferation of urban dashboards, control rooms, and benchmarking practices that transform governance into a process of collecting, crunching, and comparing numbers.
