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Dream States

Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias

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Is the ‘smart city’ the utopia we’ve been waiting for?

The promise of the so-called smart city has been at the forefront of urban planning and development since the early 2010s, and the tech industry that supplies smart city software and hardware is now worth hundreds of billions a year.

But the ideas and approaches underpinning smart city tech raise tough and important questions about the future of urban communities, surveillance, automation, and public participation. The smart city era, moreover, belongs firmly in a longer historical narrative about cities — one defined by utopian ideologies, architectural visions, and technological fantasies.

Smart streetlights, water and air quality tracking, autonomous vehicles: with examples from all over the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, and Chicago, Dream States unpacks the world of smart city tech, but also situates this important shift in city-building into a broader story about why we still dream about perfect places.

Contributors

John Lorinc

John Lorinc is a Toronto freelance journalist and editor. He writes about cities, politics, business, climate change, and local history for various media, including Spacing magazine, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, The Walrus, Corporate Knights, and, previously, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Readers’ Digest. John has won numerous National Magazine Awards for his journalism and was the 2019–20 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, which produced a series of ten articles on smart cities that were the basis of Dream States. He is the author of three previous books, including The New City (Penguin, 2006), and has co-edited several Coach House uTOpia anthologies, including The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood (2015) and Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer (2017).
Chapter Title Contents Contributors Pages Year Price

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 The introduction looks towards the future of the post-pandemic city. 13 $1.30

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 The Technology of Cities: Part 1 explores how urban development intersects and is shaped by the larger political, social, and technological advancements happening around it. Topics discussed … 9 $0.90

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 The Technology of Cities: Part 2 explores the physical building and engineering of cities. Topics discussed include construction, city-building technology, building blocks, hygiene, bridges, … 9 $0.90

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 The Technology of Cities: Part 3 explores the original urban networks, water and sewage systems. Topics discussed include the London Fire of 1666, water pumps, sewers and urban health. 10 $1.00

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 The Technology of Cities: Part 4 explores the history of lighting cities. Topics discussed include Billboards, gas lighting, electric lighting, darkness and crime, industrialization, public … 13 $1.30

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 The Technology of Cities: Part 5 explores the dilemma of cities during the Cold War. Topics discussed include nuclear war, de-urbanization, Cold War anxieties, commercialization, telephones, and more. 12 $1.20

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 The Dream of the Smart City: Part 1 explores the tech needed to create a smart city. Discussing topics including what makes technology ‘smart’, ‘machine learning’ … 18 $1.80

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 The Dream of the Smart City: Part 2 explores the origins of utopian urbanism. Topics discussed include history of urban planning, the history of ghetto’s, Bauhaus and the Garden City … 16 $1.60

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 The Dream of the Smart City: Part 3 explores planning smart cities. Topics discussed include transportation, census data,  what is meant by urban ‘blight’, public and city … 15 $1.50

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 The Dream of the Smart City: Part 4 discusses questions of personal data. Topics discussed include open access, data and privacy, data bias, open data, and municipal dashboards. 17 $1.70

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 The Dream of the Smart City: Part 5 explores the possibility of green cities with smart innovation. Topics discussed include post-industrial cities, climate change, pollution, urban … 16 $1.60

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 The Dream of the Smart City: Part 6 explores urban mobility. Topics discussed include electrification, transportation, bike-share programs, walkability, the use of public space, autonomous … 17 $1.70

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 The Dream of the Smart City: Part 7 explores  the role of surveillance in smart cities. Topics discussed include CityIQ, the use of cameras, widespread surveillance, ‘function … 13 $1.30

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 The Dream of the Smart City: Part 8 explores data-based policing. Topics discussed include facial recognition, surveillance networks., data-intensive policing technologies, and algorithms. 17 $1.70

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 The Dream of the Smart City: Part 9 explores megaprojects. Topics discussed include profits, the rise of entrepreneurial urbanization,’ the quasi-privatized new cities, and the examples of … 11 $1.10

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 The Dream of the Smart City: part 10 explores the politics of smart cities. Topics discussed include politics, think tanks, Privacy Legislation Reform, Regulatory Procedures, Data Governance, … 17 $1.70

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 Conclusion: part 1 explores the role of science and technology in pandemic cities and the lessons learned during the Covid-19 pandemic. 15 $1.50

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 Conclusion: part 2 explores how technology can be used in reshaping the post-pandemic cities. 12 $1.20