City in a Future Tense

" City in a Future Tense transports readers to the iconic smart city of Songdo, where Chamee Yang provides an insightful analysis of how technology-infused urbanization takes shape through social worlds and imaginaries."--Jennifer Gabrys, Chair in Media, Culture and Environment, University of Cambridge "An innovative and critical intervention into the study of smart cities and ideas of 'the nation.' The book advances the original concept of 'developmentality' to show how smart city formation operates not through top-down imposition but through the cultural production of future-oriented national imaginaries. Spanning four decades of archival research and fieldwork, Yang moves beyond familiar critiques of platform capitalism and smart cities to reveal how collective aspirations, anxieties, and techno-nationalist mythologies are the real infrastructures undergirding smart urbanism."--Orit Halpern, coauthor of The Smartness Mandate