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Paper long abstract:

"Smart city" is the new buzzword in cities across Eurasia. Municipal officials across the area have joined the global trend of automating urban governance with a heavy emphasis on advanced video surveillance. This paper analyzes the rapid spread of technological surveillance systems in Kyiv, Almaty, and Bishkek as a manifestation of what Jasanoff (2015) calls "dreamscapes of modernity": a collective vision of technological advancement with measurable social outcomes - a more orderly society with fewer crimes. Smart city is a sociotechnological imaginary that simultaneously strives to obtain a modern society and avoid deeper political change. While the demand for modernization of crime control may originate locally, smart technologies built on a city level are increasingly part of global hegemonic forms of knowledge production led by cities like New York, London, Seoul, as well as an emerging arena for geopolitical competition between China and Russia. A new interconnectedness between the local and global is emerging in the meantime. But exactly who is watching? Is it the global and regional powers that furnish the equipment, the municipal authorities that purchase it or security agencies? I pursue answers to these questions by comparing the content of sociotechnological imaginaries and supply chain process in three cities. Each offers a different trajectory of how to introduce smart-city policies and how to manage new technology.