Bookpresentation ‘Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives’

Rene Boer and Kees de Klein come to present and launch their new book, fresh of the press! There will be a small talk and discussion and thereafter a bit to drink.

Smooth City is about where 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.

The Presentation will take place at the Fort van Sjakoo, Jodenbreestraat 24, Amsterdam
It starts at 17h on Tuesday 20th of June
The presentation will be done in English
The shop is accessible for people in wheelchairs and people with walkers, the restroom is not.