Burcu Baykurt

I am an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism (University of California Press, 2026).

My writing and research examine technologies of statecraft from smart cities to tech nationalism to the use of automated decision systems in public agencies. Smart as a City takes readers into Kansas City, Missouri, where Google piloted a citywide gigabit network and city officials launched several smart city projects in the 2010s. Through cases including public-housing residents’ quiet refusal of “free” gigabit internet, the city’s turn to predictive analytics that largely confirmed the obvious, and public–private strategies for managing failure without naming it, the book reframes test-bed urbanism as a mode of local governance that works through civic aspiration, deliberate ignorance, and municipal politics. It argues that urban disparities are not an unintended consequence of the smart city; they are the foundation upon which it is built.

My current research follows gov-tech companies and public officials to understand what they think they are buying and selling when government data infrastructures are layered with proprietary software and government datasets circulate in data markets.

I have published in Information, Communication & Society, Big Data & Society, New Media & Society, and Urban Studies. I co-edited Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st Century Global Order (Columbia University Press, 2021) with Victoria de Grazia.

At UMass Amherst, I convene the Ethnography Collective and have co-founded the Global Technology for Social Justice (GloTech) Lab.