John Lorinc - Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias

Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias

John Lorinc

Coach House Books, Toronto

copyright John Lorinc, 2022

first edition

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Title: Dream states : smart cities, technology, and the pursuit of urban utopias / John Lorinc.

Names: Lorinc, John, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210353279 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210354836 | ISBN 9781552454282 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770566811 (PDF) | ISBN 9781770566804 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: City planningTechnological innovations. | LCSH: Smart cities. | LCSH: Urban policy. | LCSH: Urbanization.

Classification: LCC HT166 .L67 2022 | DDC 307.1/216dc23

Dream States is available as an ebook: ISBN 9781770566804 (EPUB), ISBN 9781770566811 (PDF)

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In memory of John A. Honderich, 19462022

Always the question of how to get through the city.

China Miville, The City & the City (2009)

The series of renderings had a dreamy, vaguely sci-fi feel. The images were populated, as architectural drawings always are, with people strolling, sitting, or chatting. Children, seniors, couples, some on bikes, a few in wheelchairs. The open spaces looked busy yet uncrowded.

But the ambience strongly suggested something very different than the garden-variety visual language that architectural firms produce in order to sell condos, office buildings, or public spaces. The structures, though high-rises, appeared to be constructed from wooden beams enclosing inviting, light-filled interiors. Some had generous protruding balconies tapering gracefully downward, creating a kind of intimacy over the caf-strewn pedestrian plazas below. Other renderings depicted fantastical curved bridges or luxuriant winter scenes, with string lights, falling snow, and people skating on a canal off in the distance.

The effect was transfixing and even surreal a completely conjured cityscape that would never exist, created by two of the worlds top architectural firms, Snhetta and Heatherwick Studio, in the service of what had become a profoundly contentious development scheme.

These drawings surfaced in February 2019, not quite two years after Sidewalk Labs, Googles smart city spinoff, arrived in Toronto with a promise to take a derelict piece of Torontos post-industrial waterfront and build a new neighbourhood from the internet up. The company, founded by former New York City deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, pledged to develop the so-called Quayside precinct with cutting-edge green design, a generous provision of affordable housing, tall-timber buildings, and new ideas for programming public spaces. Designed primarily for pedestrians, the area would rest atop networks of underground tunnels for pneumatic waste collection as well as autonomous delivery vehicles that would shunt courier packages between loading docks and their ultimate destinations in Quaysides high-rise residential apartments.

However, the projects main advantages had to do with the features you couldnt visualize: all manner of wireless connectivity, thousands of wireless digital sensors situated in both private and public spaces, broadband networks, and a seemingly limitless array of online applications intended to turn Quayside into what Sidewalk claimed would be the worlds smartest neighbourhood. If the project on the initial smaller site succeeded, the company planned to expand its smart city concept to the redevelopment of a much larger brownfield area nearby.

As the companys name suggested, Sidewalk wanted Quayside to become a living urban experiment, its digital features from programmable public spaces to high-tech environmental smarts in the areas buildings scaled and then exported to other cities around the world.

Along with a contingent of other reporters covering cities and tech, Id been writing regularly about this futuristic scheme, trying to figure out what, exactly, this company a well-capitalized marriage of Silicon Valley techies and New York real estate insiders was selling.

We never did find out. Scarcely a year after the release of those exotic renderings, Sidewalk abruptly announced that it was cancelling its Toronto plans, ostensibly due to the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, but also, it seemed clear, because of the relentless criticism that had dogged Sidewalk and its smart city master plan since virtually the moment it launched in October 2017. For many critics, Sidewalks corporate ties to Google simply could not be explained away.

These futuristic imaginings and the companys vision of an extensively wired community surfaced about a decade or so into the birth of the global smart city movement a confection of savvy marketing, software applications, and a dizzying range of electronic devices all meant to somehow optimize cities, thereby solving or at least ameliorating problems from congestion to emissions to street violence. As the name implies, smart cities are somehow more evolved than traditional cities, although the precise definition is fuzzy and extensively debated among academics. The term itself first surfaced in the late 2000s and is tied closely to other urbanism trends, including the growing prevalence within cities of information and communications technologies, as well as discussion about concepts like creative cities, intelligent cities, and economic clusters.

Sidewalk Labs ostensible vision of the smart city can also be understood as a point of intersection between two long-running themes in the evolution of metropolitan regions: the projection of utopian futures as a means of solving the social ills of the present, and the promises of engineered urban technologies that can be scaled, customized, and then pressed into service as a way of fostering commerce, innovation, and even social or political reform. As University of London geographer David Pinder observes, [U]topia is frequently seen as an imaginative projection of a new place or state (Pinder 2005, 15).

From the earliest periods of urban development, monarchs, philosophers, and eventually planners and architects have sought to design and build cities that aspire to some kind of idealistic vision. As Pinder, a scholar of the utopian urban tradition, explains, these have ranged from spiritual beliefs that informed the physical layout of ancient cities to the conjuring of political utopias as a means of addressing deep questions ranging from the nature of justice to the problems of poverty or social decay.

Urban-focused technology has equally deep roots, as engineers, governments, inventors, and eventually profit-minded entrepreneurs devised solutions to the kinds of problems that have always arisen whenever humans decide to create settlements: how to move around, how to ensure access to clean water, how to dispose of waste, how to create durable structures suited for the density of urban spaces, and how to communicate efficiently.