What’s so “smart” about the smart city? While smart cities have been defined in various ways in scholarly journals, popular media and the marketing materials of big business, two divergent yet related paradigms have emerged. One involves the instrumentation of the city with mobile and embedded information and computing technologies (ICT) as a means to facilitate the design, development, distribution, management, and regulation of urban systems, services and infrastructure. Data that these systems collect, process, transmit and store enable greater control over the performance of urban systems and provide new insights into how the city is inhabited collectively. In an age of Big Data, some suggest, we have the opportunity to connect, aggregate, analyze and integrate information about the urban environment in ways that enable us to better visualize, model and predict urban processes, simulate probable outcomes, and lead to more efficient and sustainable cities. The other paradigm emphasizes the development of knowledge economies within urban regions, whereby smart cities are those whose governance and economy driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship. Here, ICT is understood to play a critical role in enabling innovation and entrepreneurial activity, thereby attracting smart, creative people in order to make the city more competitive globally. This course will examine the degree to which these paradigms prioritize technocratic and market-driven approaches to the governance and development of the city, and subsequently study alternate models for the integration of technology and urban life that shift the focus from technology and the city to the role that citizens might play in developing better urban futures.