Thank you for your hospitality! 😊🎊

Not attending 4s this year but it sounds really interesting! 👍

Deadline: 5PM on October 12, 2026 (Korea Time) I am not affiliated with the hiring department and am currently on sabbatical, so I do not know the details of the position or the search. But for anyone interested, I would be happy to answer general questions about what it is like to work at SNU.

and through which we become subjects of the smart city today. @ucpress.bsky.social

to describe a governmental rationality in which yearnings for development are shaped and asserted through normative visions of desirable futures and through practices that identify spaces, populations, and ways of life as in need of transformation and upgrading

In City in a Future Tense, I argue that answering these questions requires tracing the deeper cultural histories through which technological futures are imagined, desired, negotiated, and contested. I develop a concept of “developmentality”--moving beyond state-centered accounts of developmentalism

mobilize actions before their promises can be realized. What kinds of aspirations, anxieties, moral imperatives, and forms of expertise generate momentum toward a technology-driven future?

This conceptual flexibility has allowed the promise of smart urbanism to persist despite recurring criticism, unfulfilled expectations, and material consequences. Rather than dismissing such visions as mere 'hype' or 'myth', however, the book asks how technological futures acquire the capacity to

Much like the future itself, the smart city is often presented as a horizon of possibilities: a provisional testbed holding the promise of optimization and constant update, while repeatedly renewing what constitutes its goals, whether sustainability, development, security, or something else.

The book traces the history of Songdo--known as one of the first "smart cities" in the world--and offers a cultural, historical, and locally grounded account of smart urbanism. It begins with a rather simple question: "When, where, and how does a smart city begin?"