The Smartification of Everything: Critical Perspectives in Sciences, Arts, and Society
From the smart phone to the smart home, smartness has become an almost inescapable reality of everyday life. Supposedly intelligent, interconnected technologies, smart systems have taken on their own forms of life, and it is no longer easy to determine who these systems benefit  and what their long-term social and ethical implications may be. In twenty contributions spanning the social sciences, humanities, and the arts, The Smartification of Everything offers a deep dive into a variety of studies that critically interrogate smartification processes and systems.
The book is edited by experts in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, and sociology, and is written by academics and artists working across a diverse range of disciplines, including geography, architecture, and urban studies, among others. The volume moves beyond the digital hype cycle around smart cities, artificial intelligence, or the Internet of Things, which presents smart tech as neat spaces of continuous improvement. Instead, the authors illustrate how smartness is partial, messy, and contested, while also situated in specific sociocultural, historical, spatial, and political realities.
The Smartification of Everything questions the potential and the limitations of smart systems and in doing so furthers our understanding of the complex dynamics today among technology, environment, and power.
1148033187
The Smartification of Everything: Critical Perspectives in Sciences, Arts, and Society
From the smart phone to the smart home, smartness has become an almost inescapable reality of everyday life. Supposedly intelligent, interconnected technologies, smart systems have taken on their own forms of life, and it is no longer easy to determine who these systems benefit  and what their long-term social and ethical implications may be. In twenty contributions spanning the social sciences, humanities, and the arts, The Smartification of Everything offers a deep dive into a variety of studies that critically interrogate smartification processes and systems.
The book is edited by experts in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, and sociology, and is written by academics and artists working across a diverse range of disciplines, including geography, architecture, and urban studies, among others. The volume moves beyond the digital hype cycle around smart cities, artificial intelligence, or the Internet of Things, which presents smart tech as neat spaces of continuous improvement. Instead, the authors illustrate how smartness is partial, messy, and contested, while also situated in specific sociocultural, historical, spatial, and political realities.
The Smartification of Everything questions the potential and the limitations of smart systems and in doing so furthers our understanding of the complex dynamics today among technology, environment, and power.
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The Smartification of Everything: Critical Perspectives in Sciences, Arts, and Society

The Smartification of Everything: Critical Perspectives in Sciences, Arts, and Society

The Smartification of Everything: Critical Perspectives in Sciences, Arts, and Society

The Smartification of Everything: Critical Perspectives in Sciences, Arts, and Society

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Overview

From the smart phone to the smart home, smartness has become an almost inescapable reality of everyday life. Supposedly intelligent, interconnected technologies, smart systems have taken on their own forms of life, and it is no longer easy to determine who these systems benefit  and what their long-term social and ethical implications may be. In twenty contributions spanning the social sciences, humanities, and the arts, The Smartification of Everything offers a deep dive into a variety of studies that critically interrogate smartification processes and systems.
The book is edited by experts in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, and sociology, and is written by academics and artists working across a diverse range of disciplines, including geography, architecture, and urban studies, among others. The volume moves beyond the digital hype cycle around smart cities, artificial intelligence, or the Internet of Things, which presents smart tech as neat spaces of continuous improvement. Instead, the authors illustrate how smartness is partial, messy, and contested, while also situated in specific sociocultural, historical, spatial, and political realities.
The Smartification of Everything questions the potential and the limitations of smart systems and in doing so furthers our understanding of the complex dynamics today among technology, environment, and power.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781487556747
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Publication date: 10/14/2025
Series: Technoscience and Society
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
File size: 21 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Mascha Gugganig is a senior lecturer and co-director of the Center of Life Sciences in Society at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Kelly Bronson holds the Canada Research Chair in Science and Society at University of Ottawa where she is an associate professor of sociology.
Vincent Mirza is the director of the Research Centre on the Future of Cities and an associate professor of anthropology at the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Table of Contents

Illustrations
Tables

Foreword: Smartification from Shine to Glare
Rachel Douglas-Jones

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction to the Smartification of Everything
Mascha Gugganig, Kelly Bronson, and Vincent Mirza

Part 1: The (Settler) Colonial Roots of Smartification

2. Introduction to the (Settler) Colonial Roots of Smartification
Mascha Gugganig
3. The Smartification of Global Development
Kendra Kintzi And Hilary Faxon
4. Refusing the Urban Laboratory
Abhishek Viswanathan, Bobbie Fan
5. Making Timber “Smart”: Architecture, Technology, and Place in the Pacific Northwest
Meg Wiessner
6. Unformattable: The Meaning of Cleared Land in Copy-Pasteable Smart City Technology Transfer from South Korea to Vietnam
June Yeoreum Kim

Part 2: Plastering Frictions and Fissures with Smartness
7. Introduction to Plastering Frictions and Fissures with Smartness
Vincent Mirza
8. How Not to Define the Smart City
Junnan Mu
9. From Smart Buildings to Smart Users? Energy Transition to the Test of Parasitic Humans
Gabriel Dorthe And Laure Dobigny
10. Out of Thin Air: Vertiplaces
Simon Rabyniuk
11. What Is Optimized Farming? Exploring the Smartness Mandate in Canadian Agriculture
Sarah Marquis

Part 3: Smartification as Boundary Work
12. Introduction to Smartification as Boundary Work
Mascha Gugganig
13. Reframing Smart Urbanism
Ali Fard
14. The Smart Oasis: Smartification as Process
Sebastian Bornschlegl
15. Disposable: Infrastructures of Exclusion in Dharamshala’s Smart City
Hannah Carlan
16. Wal*Smartification: Considering the Superimposition of Dockless Shared Electric Scooters on Fayetteville, Arkansas
Devin Shepherd and Juliette Walker

Part 4: Opening Smartness
17. Introduction to Opening up Smartness
Kelly Bronson
18. Floodsmart: “Equity in Action” or Equity Inaction?
Martin Abbott
19. Should I Stay, or Should I Go? Questioning the “Smartness” of Intelligent Pedestrian Traffic Lights in Vienna
Pouya Sepehr
20. Outsmarting Urbanism: Could Leveraging the ‘Right to Be Rural’ Produce Alternative Futures?
S. Ashleigh Weeden
21. Rural Expertise and the Sewer 
Jean Hardy

Part 5: Rethinking Smartness
22. Introduction to Rethinking Smartness
Kelly Bronson
23. Contesting Smartness in an Unequal City
Soha Macktoom and Aqdas Fatima
24. Future Movement Future – Rejected
Bruno Moreschi and Gabriel Pereira
25. Thinking like a City
Carola Moujan
26. Unfamiliar Convenient 
Claire Glanois and Vytautas Jankauskas

Conclusion
Mascha Gugganig, Kelly Bronson, and Vincent Mirza
List Of Contributors

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