Abstract

In the technological imaginary of the ‘smart city’, new practices of visualizing protect against a multiplicity of forces that threaten to destabilize urban life. Computational urbanism promises access to a privileged and commanding perspective on the dynamics of the city. Critical responses to this speculative ideal tend to focus on how the exploitation of such a perspective might compromise the uniquely human character of urban relations. There is, however, a more radical implication of urban smartness, namely a situation in which living more intimately with nonhuman objects and processes reveals the humanist vision of the city to be both highly partial and dangerously occluded. Taking the smartness of the city seriously means confronting a threat to the dominance of human agency and autonomy itself. It also means newly investigating the weird reality of city life, which this chapter does by examining practices of urban detection in recent examples of speculative fiction.