Smooth City: against urban perfection, towards collective alternatives

The Royal Danish Academy invites you to a lecture with René Boer, who examines the so-called 'smooth city,' where urban space is sterilized, and city life is reduced to a frictionless experience. 

In cities around the world a new urban condition is spreading rapidly, characterized by ever-increasing levels of ‘perfection’, efficiency, control, and the active eradication of any aberration or alternative. In the smooth city, urban space is sanitized and urban life is compressed into a seamless experience. 

While the need for safe, clean, and well-functioning urban environments is clear, the rise of the smooth city undermines the democratic nature and emancipatory potential of cities as it leaves almost no space for anything that is experimental or incompatible with dominant norms. 

This lecture offers a critical analysis of the origins, characteristics, and consequences of the smooth city, while also offering a starting point to challenge the obsession with perfection and instead collectively work towards porosity in the urban realm.

About René Boer

René Boer (1986) works as a critic, curator and organizer in and beyond the fields of architecture, design, heritage and the arts. In his practice he articulates new perspectives on spatial conditions and facilitates fertile ground for imagining and materialising alternatives. He is a founding partner of Loom - practice for cultural transformation, part of the transnational platform Failed Architecture and affiliated with various urban social movements as well as art, architecture and design schools in Amsterdam and beyond. In 2023, he published 'Smooth City' with Valiz Publishers.