Abstract

Through an ethnography of two “Smart Nation” smart home projects in Singapore, I detail how state planners project and replicate future imaginaries through the smart city by repeatedly materialising them in smart urban infrastructure. These historically-rooted planning practices project some residents as representing and productive of national futures while excluding others. Residents repeatedly and materially engage with these imaginaries, sometimes replicating and sometimes reimagining them, through everyday embodied engagement with smart urban infrastructures.

I show how these residents disrupt and create un-accounted for data flows in their daily lives, focusing on racial minorities, queer residents, and noncitizens for whom data flows mean continued exclusion from national futures. I argue that overemphasis on visible protest in public space neglects the impacts of these quotidian acts of political resistance, particularly in highly surveilled contexts. Analysing instead how differentiated residents navigate their “technological everyday” (Amin 2007) by spatialising “geographic counter-stories” (Kobayashi 2005), I argue, shows how state power is expressed and experienced through smart urban infrastructure. It also illuminates residents’ agency in co-producing smart city futures, constructing their senses of self and nation, and practicing (smart) citizenship.