Seven books for city leaders and community organizers to understand smart cities and the past, present, and future of urban technology infrastructure.
The fight over tech infrastructure in our cities didn’t start with ChatGPT, and it won’t end with it, either.
For decades, technology companies have been arriving in cities and communities with grand promises of jobs, efficiency, and automated utopias, but ultimately extracting far more than they delivered: land, water, public subsidies, data, democratic control over local decisions. The tools and the scale have changed; the pattern hasn’t.
As part of our series In the Shadow of the Server, we’re sharing a selection of books that trace that pattern to help city builders and community leaders understand what is happening, why it’s happening, and what might actually be done about it.
Some are reported dispatches from specific fights — a Toronto waterfront, an Amazon warehouse town, the welfare offices of Allegheny County. Others build the frameworks that help explain why these fights keep happening and who keeps losing them. Together, they form the essential context for the moment we’re in: communities across the country organizing against a new wave of tech infrastructure that is arriving faster, demanding more, and disclosing less than anything that came before.
- Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy
Josh O’Kane (2022): A reporter at The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper, offers a blow-by-blow account of how Google’s urban tech subsidiary Sidewalk Labs tried to build a data-harvesting “smart neighborhood” on Toronto’s waterfront and got beaten back by a coalition of residents, privacy advocates, and local officials. This is the template: a tech giant, a secretive deal, community organizing, and a fight over who controls the city’s future. Read an excerpt at Next City.
- Dracula Urbanism and Smart City Mania
David Wilson and Elvin Wyly (2024): Two geography professors use Bram Stoker’s vampire as a framework for understanding how smart city development actually works: seductive, parasitic, targeting those who are already vulnerable. The authors argue that today’s “smart city” development practices are aimed at creating opportunities to attract wealth and resources to cities, but the consequences are similar: punishing the poor, working class, recent immigrants, and homeless populations.
- Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
Virginia Eubanks (2018): A political scientist traces how automated decision-making systems in welfare, child protective services, and public housing systematically harm low-income communities and communities of color. Today’s fixation on bringing AI into urban governance risks the same dystopian results, if implemented without care. As Frank Pasquale, author of The Blackbox Society, put it: “Everyone should read this book to learn how modern governance, all too often shrouded behind impenetrable legal and computer code, actually works.”
- The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future
Ben Green (2019): A sharp, readable takedown of smart city utopianism. An MIT researcher argues that technology isn’t inherently progressive, that it reflects and amplifies existing power structures, and that cities need civic capacity and political will more than sensors and apps.
- World Eaters: How Venture Capital Is Cannibalizing the Economy
Catherine Bracy (2025): A civic technologist who formerly led Code for America shows how VC’s extractive practices are bleeding into all industries, undermining the labor and housing markets, and posing unique dangers to the economy at large.
- A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences
Shannon Mattern (2021): Three years ago, when tech publication The Verge asked readers for their all-time favorite books on technology, they pointed to A City Is Not a Computer. It’s a remarkable achievement for an academic-press book about urbanism and epistemology. A New York City-based anthropologist argues that the “city-as-computer” metaphor reduces place-based knowledge to information processing, and that cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligence that algorithms can’t capture and data dashboards can’t see. It’s also worth checking out Mattern’s 2017 book Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media.
- Grounding the Cloud
Ali Fard (July 2026): Since the ‘90s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. In this forthcoming book, an architecture professor peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction: mines extracting rare earth minerals, fiber-optic cables on the ocean floor, data centers on the edges of cities. Read an excerpt at Next City, which offers another take on the Sidewalk Labs story.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Aysha Khan
Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: Next City, 29.04.2026
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
