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This communication explores the unique challenge of contemporary urban problems and the technologies that vendors have to solve them. An acknowledged gap exists between widely referenced technologies that city managers utilize to optimize scheduled operations and those that reflect the capability of spontaneity in search of nuance-laden solutions to problems related to the reflexivity of entire systems. With regulation, the first issue type succumbs to rehearsed preparation whereas the second hinges on extemporaneous practice. One is susceptible to ready-made technology applications while the other requires systemic deconstruction and solution-seeking redesign. Research suggests that smart city vendors are expertly configured to address the former, but less adept at and even ill-configured to react to and address the latter. Departures from status quo responses to systemic problems depend on formalizing metrics that enable city monitoring and data collection to assess "smart investments", regardless of the size of the intervention, and to anticipate the need for designs that preserve the individuality of urban settings as they undergo the transformation to become "smart".

Prison construction experienced explosive growth over the 1980s and 1990s. Many poor rural communities invited prisons into their environs, anticipating jobs and economic development. However, with one notable exception, no ex post empirical studies exist of the economic effects of prison construction on rural counties. Following an extensive review of the literature, this research uses a quasiexperimental control group method to examine the effect of state-run prisons constructed in rural counties between 1985 and 1995 on county earnings by employment sector, population, poverty rate, and degree of economic health. Analysis suggests a limited economic effect on rural places in general, but may have a positive impact on poverty rates in persistently poor rural counties, as measured by diminishing transfer payments and increasing state and local government earnings in places with relatively good economic health. However, there is little evidence that prison impacts were significant enough to foster structural economic change.