Symbolism of the Smart City is a research book produced for my MS. This work explores the burgeoning desires for Smart Cities across the globe, beginning by assessing their functionality and the rationality behind them. The research then illustrates how the paradigm of smartness has been adopted by entrepreneurial urban governments across the globe in order to remain competitive in a changing economic landscape, dominated by new forms of technology and information capital. I then analyze the components of the new urban images that have been produced in the quest for high-tech cities. This includes renderings from smart city design briefs, that typically rely on a spectacular, hyper-real visual language. In the case of Hudson Yards, I address how a new spectacle now exists as part of New York City’s architectural iconography, obscuring its own political reality within its material forms. The spatial analysis in this research seeks to understand what the new symbols offered by “Cities of Tomorrow” can tell us about the political imaginaries that are being sold, and what they reveal about the rapidly growing distance between image and reality.


Selected pages from the book are available to click through here, and a text excerpt is available here.