Burcu Baykurt is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From April to October 2022, she was a fellow at CAIS, where her project involved a comparative study of how U.S. municipalities have collected, analyzed, and published COVID-19 data since April 2020. Her research focused on smart cities and urban inequalities, technologies of state governance, and the global political economy of digital infrastructures. During her time at CAIS, she completed several chapters of her new book “Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism.”
About the book
“Smart as a City” is an ethnographic study of how “smartness” is received and negotiated in a mid-sized U.S. city. Burcu Baykurt follows civil society actors, residents, and city officials in Kansas City, Missouri, where Google tested a citywide gigabit service and the city implemented smart city pilot projects in transportation, housing, and municipal services. She understands “smartness” as a collective effort to make local problems visible and to align solutions with often flawed technologies from tech companies. The success of this alignment is hard to achieve and ambivalent; at the same time, she shows that data capitalism extracts value from urban inequalities rather than resolving them.
The book (ISBN 9780520413252) is published by University of California Press. An excerpt is available at this link.
Baykurt, B. (2026). Smart as a city: The politics of Test-Bed urbanism. In University of California Press (1st ed.). University of California Press. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/smart-as-a-city/paper#about-book