Smooth City

In cities around the world a new urban condition is spreading

rapidly: an ever-increasing push for ‘perfection’, efficiency

and control and the active eradication of any

aberration, friction or alternative. The smooth city with its

sanitized spaces and new technologies compresses urban

life into a seamless experience. While the demand for safe,

clean, and well-functioning urban environments is understandable,

the rise of the smooth city undermines the democratic

nature and emancipatory potential of cities, while

leaving almost no space for anything that is experimental,

non-normative, transgressive or otherwise out of tune.

Smooth City provides a coherent framework to effectively

criticize the enormous and in many ways problematic

impact of ‘smoothness’ on cities everywhere, by investigating

its origins, characteristics and consequences. At

the same time, it offers a starting point to challenge the

obsession with perfection and instead collectively work

towards much needed alternatives.