City in a Future Tense

The Making of a Smart City in South Korea

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

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. 

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