Abstract

Critical responses to the ‘smart city’ tend to focus on threats to the ostensibly human character of urban relations. Yet living more intimately with nonhuman objects and processes reveals the human 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 demands investigating the weird reality of urban life, which this chapter does by examining practices of detection in the American science-fiction series, Person of Interest (CBS, 2011-2016), and Jeff VanderMeer’s weird crime novel, Finch (2009).