Identification and the “intelligent city”

In J.G. Ballard’s novel Super-Cannes, brochures for the futuristic corporate complex Eden-Olympia cast it as an “intelligent city”, whose occupants are tracked and monitored by a pervasive network of CCTV surveillance cameras and security staff. Comparing representations of surveillance and monitoring technologies in Super-Cannes (2000) and Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY (2017), this chapter shows how these fictions use the idea of an “intelligent city” to explore the personal ramifications of living in an environment of near-constant visual monitoring. Ballard and Barker’s literary representations of “intelligent” spaces demonstrate how literary representations can shape our understanding of contemporary “smart” environments, by examining the fraught intersection of personal lives with public infrastructures.