City in a Future Tense

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Songdo, South Korea, is one of the earliest and most ambitious smart city projects. Mythical narratives have painted it as a promised land of the future where the problems and struggles of the present have been efficiently transcended—or concealed—by technology. In City in a Future Tense, Chamee Yang interrogates these myths and traces Songdo's story to show how it emerged out of a complex interplay of governmental rationality, cultural aspirations, and collective anxiety about the future. Drawing on Korea's developmental past and relentless drive toward a technological future, visions of freedom, security, and connectivity converged with new techniques of governance to shape a distinctive urban form. By challenging the reduction of the smart city to a mere government policy, stage of capitalism, or ready-made solution to urban problems, Yang offers a new way of understanding the smart city as the contingent outcome of multiple, competing futures—a reality that is still pending. 

Chamee Yang is Assistant Professor of Communication at Seoul National University. 

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Networks, Hubs, and Zones: Infrastructural Development in New Songdo City, 1986–2009

Chapter 2. Smart Green City: Developmentality and Environment as Ecosystem

Chapter 3. The City Must Be Defended Digitally: Surveillance, Security, and Everyday Environments of Control

Chapter 4. Cultural Economies of Creativity and “New Intelligence”: K-Culture and Songdo

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index