This forum will highlight critical perspectives on theorizing the smart city by bringing together an interdisciplinary set of scholarship. Aaron Tucker examines the role of computer vision and facial recognition software in the smart city. Angela Orasch presents an analysis on the political economy of smart-city aesthetics vis-à-vis the processes of gentrification and displacement. Arun Jacob interrogates how digital mapping practices reveal the 'genealogies of power' operationalized in smart cities, and how activists can champion participatory democratic practices in these spaces. Constantine Gidaris looks at the negative impacts that systems led by racialized modes of digital surveillance and predictive policing and technologies continue to have on marginalized people and communities.