For about a decade, between 2010 and the Covid-19 pandemic, the ‘smart city’ influenced urban discourses, policies and investments worldwide. Smart city projects have been glorified as paths for sustainability, economic growth and inclusion, or criticised as vehicles of corporatisation and technocratic surveillance. Drawing on case studies from Kolkata and Cape Town, Future-Proofed offers a novel angle on the (un)making of smart cities by exploring their speculative life. This book illustrates how speculation—the logic of appropriating and shaping the future—is a technopolitical force, no longer limited to finance, propelling a wide range of urban processes, from infrastructural development to governance. Smart cities have been built on speculative operations of various kinds: they have been used as testbeds for new technological products, governed through preemptive analytics, and fuelled by high-risk financial investments. At work across design and planning, governance, and economies, speculation produces novel configurations of urban futures that are far from neutral or objective. Informed by power relations, political goals, and profit strategies, speculative technologies seek to anticipate the future to govern the present. As debates on the ethics and politics of digital technologies become more pressing than ever, insights into the speculative operations that inform urban ‘smartness’, and into their implications on everyday life, spatial justice, and citizens’ rights, are of particular importance.