City in a Future Tense: The Making of a Smart City in South Korea

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.