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Smart city rhetoric promises a utopia of efficiency, equality, and well-being, but the everyday application of these tools—namely predictive analytics, sensors, and data dashboards—are often frantically applied to prevent that which is unwanted: crime, harm, disaster, opacity, and inequality. To achieve “smartness,” though, appears to only be imaginanble through an increasingly invasive level of civic surveillance.

Substantive Caption:As an urban humanist interested in the intellectual history of the Nazi period, I am grappling with a unique remnant of this time: Albert Speer’s so called heavy load-bearing cylinder; a massive concrete structure outweighing the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and the statue of Jesus Christ in Rio de Janeiro combined. Originally planned as an engineering measure to prepare Berlin’s unpredictable soil for the erection of a gigantic triumphal arch, this fragment of an unfinished project still haunts the collective consciousness.