| Abstract |
Over the past two decades, 'smart' urban mega-developments built from scratch have proliferated across the Global South. More recently, similar techno-utopian enclaves are being planned in North America, including Union Point, a smart city project south of Boston announced in 2017. We use the case of Union Point to think through why public and private actors with conventionally competing interests, including local governments, international technology companies, and real estate developers, are collaborating enthusiastically to create smart mega-developments. This alignment of interests in the use of 'tech' to engineer the 'city of the future', and the pervasive idealism, entrepreneurialism, and 'high-risk, high-rewards' attitudes that enable 'instant' smart mega-developments, is characterized by what we term 'unicorn planning'. This article connects Union Point to the global phenomenon of tabula rasa smart city developments and suggests that Union Point reproduces problems of earlier smart city experiments built from scratch in the Middle East and Asia. We critically examine local officials' susceptibility to being seduced by smart city rhetoric, and highlight their troubling willingness to cede public land, power, citizen privacy, and data governance to corporate actors in their entrepreneurial quest to create an instant 'tech' hub. |