‘Always the question of how to get through the city.’
– China Miéville, 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 café-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 world’s top architectural firms, Snøhetta 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, Google’s smart city spinoff, arrived in Toronto with a promise to take a derelict piece of Toronto’s 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 Quayside’s high-rise residential apartments.
However, the project’s main advantages had to do with the features you couldn’t 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 world’s 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 company’s 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 area’s buildings – scaled and then exported to other cities around the world.
Along with a contingent of other reporters covering cities and tech, I’d 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, Sidewalk’s corporate ties to Google simply could not be explained away.
These futuristic imaginings and the company’s 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.
While the history and evolution of urban space has been wrought from commerce, war, social upheaval, and the complicated diffusion of ideas, the story of city-building, in many ways, is also about the collision between utopian dreams and engineered solutions. Both have sought to improve or perfect the urban condition. There have been many examples, particularly since the dawn of the industrial era, when these two impulses converged or aligned, yet others where they came into direct conflict. Time is also a factor, as the utopian solutions to one era’s failings become the political or technological conundrums of the next. Or vice versa.
The rise and fall of Sidewalk’s Toronto venture has spawned dozens of academic studies, grassroots political movements, and policy reforms, as well as an international reconsideration of the promise of smart city technology in the light of deep concerns about privacy, data security, and the unchecked financialization of urban space. But the company’s very deliberate elision of utopianism and technology presents an opportunity to focus on the ways in which cities have provided a stage upon which these competing visions of social life play out.
Especially in a period when the vast majority of human beings live in urban regions, cities offer incredible opportunities, but also crushing pressures and seemingly intractable inequities. The city, in some ways, is a geography of problems and solutions, chasing one another through time and space. These most complex of human institutions spark the imaginations of those who aspire to build a better world, either using dreams or inventions.
Sidewalk, like the hundreds of tech companies that have gravitated toward the multi-billion-dollar smart city industry since the early 2010s, sought to do both. The reasons behind its failure offer some important lessons about the future of the post-pandemic city.
This book grew out of several years of reporting I did on the smart city movement, which turned into an extended series in the Toronto Star that was supported very generously through a fellowship provided by the Atkinson Foundation.
In my first journalistic encounter with the concept of smart cities, I wrote a feature for the Globe and Mail, in 2015, on the emergence of these technologies. One example struck a chord. I interviewed Mike Flowers, a tough-talking New York lawyer who had served in Iraq with military intelligence and somehow wound up working for then-mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg made his billions selling and analyzing financial data, and he was determined to bring that same ethic into the lumbering, archaic world of municipal government.
Flowers, who liked to refer to Bloomberg as ‘the old man,’ worked as part of a small flying squad of data scientists in the mayor’s office. He would go to various New York City departments and beg them to hand over sprawling databases of granular building-level information about fire code violations, upgrades, liens, tax arrears, and so on. Using what he described as a ‘data bridge,’ Flowers and his team poured all those data sets into one giant spreadsheet that had a separate entry for every municipal address in New York. Then they started looking for patterns, ‘querying’ the spreadsheet to look for common traits of buildings where there had been fires. They eventually found the proverbial needle in the haystack and reckoned they could begin sending notices to landlords whose buildings showed similar patterns of neglect, reasoning that these structures were more likely to fall victim to fire. It was, fundamentally, a data-driven prevention strategy, geared in this case to mitigate fire risk.
But Flowers, no wide-eyed technophile, knew enough to gut check this process. He would go on ride-alongs with seasoned New York bylaw inspectors. They’d swing by a building that the data patterns had flagged as a potential fire trap, and sometimes the inspectors, following a quick look-around, would spot a counterfactual – a detail that suggested the building didn’t pose the risk that the data predicted. Those conclusions, Flowers told me, were based on experience, observation, and common sense – all traits, he noted, that couldn’t be automated.
The mayor’s efforts to bring data science to municipal decision-making didn’t stop at city hall. In one of his signature moves, he invited technical research institutions from around the world to bid on the opportunity to build a world-class technology and engineering campus on city-owned land in order to fill a gap in New York’s university offerings.
Bloomberg had made huge donations to academic public health institutions, but he saw this initiative as a way to seed start-ups, attract venture capital, and build an east coast tech hub to rival Boston. Among the winning projects was something called the Center for Urban Science and Progress, a degree-granting research joint venture between NYU, Carnegie Mellon University, and several other academic partners, including the University of Toronto and a host of blue-chip tech giants. It describes its field – ‘urban informatics’ – as the ‘interdisciplinary application of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the service of urban communities across the globe.’
Intrigued, I wrote several more stories about the use of data analytics to confront urban issues from air pollution to policing. One project, developed in Saskatoon, aimed to use predictive analytics to identify Indigenous youth who were at risk of running away. From a great distance, the initiative, a joint venture by the University of Saskatchewan and the Saskatoon police department, might have seemed well-intentioned. But once you peeled the onion, it became clear this somewhat creepy project – the data required included personal information from social service agencies – had more to do with treating the symptoms than addressing root causes.
And then Sidewalk Labs rode into town. In many ways, the company’s gambit was the journalistic gift that kept on giving. It had all the ingredients – money, politics, real estate speculation, sci-fi technology, and combatants with global reputations and deep pockets. What’s more, it seemed that Sidewalk, which conspicuously eschewed the phrase ‘smart cities,’ appeared intent on disrupting the multi-billion-dollar smart city industry, then dominated by tech giants like Cisco, IBM, and Siemens. After all, disruption, in those halcyon pre-pandemic years, was an investor-friendly euphemism for the tech sector’s compulsion to overwhelm, wreck, and monopolize whatever stood in its way. Google and Sidewalk, in other words, seemed motivated by a desire to disrupt cities – an objective historically used to describe the work of marauders, invading armies, and natural disasters.
The first section of the book is about the long history of the relationship between cities and city-building technology, everything from some of the most fundamental forms of architecture to the digital connectivity of our era. In the history of urbanism, the engineering technologies that enabled city-building have often been depicted as playing a supporting role to more dramatic architectural and social developments, and were frequently regarded as the non-political work of technical experts. Yet, as the U.S. historian Mark Rose pointed out in a 1988 paper entitled ‘Machine Politics: The Historiography of Technology and Public Policy,’ city-altering technologies must always be understood to exist within a broader political context. ‘The history of urban government [represents] a story of technological achievement and sophisticated financing, a story of greater breadth and complexity than has yet been recorded’ (Rose).
The bulk of the book’s second section offers a deep dive into this giant family of predominantly digital innovations that have emerged from tech giants and start-ups alike, as well as the far-reaching policy, political, and even philosophical questions these systems pose. Dream States is also tied to my interest in city-building, public space, urban history, and the myriad technologies that emerged over centuries, giving rise to the emergence of the modern metropolis. Indeed, I’d argue that the two litmus tests for any twenty-first-century smart city technology is whether it both stands the test of time and advances the cause of city-building.
In discussing technology, I have relied in part on the broad definition developed by the German-Canadian physicist and peace activist Ursula Franklin. Her view of technology, articulated in the 1989 Massey Lectures, went far beyond the realm of gadgets and inventions. Technology, she asserted, encompassed systems, methods, and processes, some of which were holistic, like the work of artisans, and others that were essentially prescriptive and thus employed by governments, companies, and other institutions as instruments of ‘compliance and conformity.’ Others, like the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells, add that technology can be defined as the ‘use of scientific knowledge to specify ways of doing things in a reproducible manner’ (Castells 1996, 30).
The chapters that follow will also examine the complicated space where urban technology intersects with what one might describe, very broadly, as the theories of the city. Some are utopian fictions and social critiques, while others take a sociological, observational, or even quantitative approach to explaining the nature of urban life. A few have sought to combine both into programmatic approaches to city-building and social reform.
The city is one of humanity’s oldest inventions, and constantly expanding settlements have served as the backdrop or staging ground for much of recorded history – ancient imperial capitals, like Rome, Kyoto, or Tenochtitlan, and, later, restless centres of commerce, like Venice, Timbuktu, London, and New York. In some cases, like medieval Florence, the inflow of vast amounts of capital and the emergence of rich merchant clans somehow sparked (or at least underwrote) periods of intense cultural or inventive activity. Others, like the contemporary Bay Area/Silicon Valley region, function like hothouse incubators for digital technologies that have changed just about everything.
Today, in most developed countries, more than 80 per cent of the population lives in cities. Globally, that figure surpassed 50 per cent in 2008. But until the nineteenth century, most of humanity did not inhabit urban areas. Indeed, the vast majority of cities, which had evolved from trading posts, ports, fortifications, oases, or hubs for the marketing of agricultural products, were hardly desirable places to live, except for those with means or some kind of ancestral privilege. Deadly epidemics regularly tore through cities, killing or dispersing the inhabitants. Even in wealthy metropolises with extensive infrastructure, like Rome at the height of its influence, the vast majority lived in squalor. ‘Rome,’ writes historian Peter Hall, ‘was a city of contrasts: on the one hand, the rich who could spend vast sums on banquets and all manner of luxuries; on the other, the poor who depended on the notorious panem et circenses (bread and circuses) and who survived under the bridges or in small, dark, cold, rat-infested slums’ (Hall 1998, 626).
Thomas More, the English social philosopher, coined the term utopia in his 1516 treatise envisioning a just society. Long before More, Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, examined similar philosophical questions. But urban utopianism per se emerged much later, as one of many responses to the chaotic forces that gave rise to the modern city, namely the Industrial Revolution that began in England in the eighteenth century and the cotton mills of Lancashire.
Rapid industrialization gave rise to the emergence of a new urban underclass, people drawn to cities to work in factories and relegated to overcrowded slum districts. Yet industrialization also created new forms of urban affluence, and the emerging capitalist and bourgeois classes began to retreat from the crowded and dirty inner city to proto-suburban enclaves characterized by private homes and green spaces – in other words, delineated domestic/residential outskirts suited for families.
In response to the harsh urban world of the nineteenth century, social reformers proposed solutions, some of which were explicitly utopian. Cities and their common problems could be abstracted from specific histories and geographies, and thus became the objects of the work of critics, artists, and inventor-entrepreneurs, as well as emerging technical disciplines, like planning, architecture, and transportation engineering.
For well over a century, in fact, metropolitan regions have become the stages upon which these competing ideas have played out. They encompass the various strands of utopian city planning advocated by thinkers like Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, but also successive political and technocratic programs that yielded enormous infrastructure schemes, top-down land-use planning and urban redevelopment schemes.
Critics like Jane Jacobs pushed back against the authoritarian dictates of modernist urban planning; her observations and brand of advocacy have been taken up by countless neighbourhood activists, local politicians, and land-use planners seeking – perhaps ironically – to replicate the organic urbanism she extolled.
Many others have followed, identifying trends (Edge Cities), promoting neo-traditional, climate-conscious planning (New Urbanism; Smart Growth), or asserting the economic primacy of networked urban regions in global trade flows. Some academic urbanists explain cities as ‘systems of systems’ or concentrated hubs that spark creativity and innovation. A few have even sought to explain cities scientifically, arguing, as physicist Geoffrey West does in his 2017 book Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, that the stages of urban expansion can be predicted using empirical observations about natural/economic phenomena like biological growth and scale.
This copious buffet of urbanist thinking has been taken up differently in different places, with varying results, some of which were utterly unintended and even savagely destructive in their application, such as some modernist public housing schemes. In most big cities, however, the effect is that of a palimpsest – layers upon layers, all of it buffeted by the relentless tides of people, ideas, and capital that wash in and out.
At the same time, there are many big cities that exist with almost no apparent nod to the waves of urbanist advocacy and development that have spread around the globe. Before the pandemic, I spent a few days in Hanoi, a city of relentless, anarchic energy. In its core, there are streets lined with four- and five-storey colonial buildings that completely altered my notion of mixed use. Street entrances pass through small shops to interior foyers in which the tenants park their scooters. Steep switchback staircases pass through apartment landings, small temples, offices, and cafés spread out over multiple floors. There is no obvious order, and yet somehow it all works.
The smart city agenda aimed to impose a measure of rationality on twenty-first-century urbanism, with all its chaotic energy. Certainly, to those charged with governing and administering cities, the technocratic promise of the smart city has been highly appealing. After all, what city wouldn’t want to be ‘smart’? The phrase, moreover, is malleable enough to mean many things to many people. Does ‘smart’ connote the type of inhabitant who resides in these places? Is it a reference to rationalist approaches to municipal administration that leveraged technology to overcome daunting urban problems, like congestion? Or perhaps the label has a kind of brand appeal designed to attract companies, investors, inventors – smart people.
‘One widely-used definition … defines cities as smart when ‘investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance,’ commented the authors of a 2020 German study on the ‘varieties of smart cities’ (Drapalova & Weigrich).
Yet, as this study and many others have observed, the tech industry seized on the ‘smart city’ label as a means of developing and selling new generations of scalable digital systems that claim to be capable of tackling complex urban problems, from climate change to security to mobility. Most urbanists and city planners now accept complexity as a given. In a world of mass migration, instantaneous communication, and environmental crisis, anyone who fails to acknowledge that everything is complicated simply isn’t paying attention.
The purveyors of smart city tech, which relies on big data, algorithms, sensors, and artificial intelligence, regard urban complexity as both a market opportunity and an engineering challenge. Smart city companies, from ambitious start-ups to multinational tech giants, promote their powerful and highly adaptive systems as being well suited to the messy, overcrowded urbanism of the twenty-first century.
While not the only target markets for smart city tech, municipal and regional governments have proven to be highly responsive customers, amenable to the messaging that better technology will improve services and lower costs, but also prevent them from falling behind. Case in point: an annual global ranking published by a smart city ‘observatory’ that’s run by the IMD World Competitiveness Center, which is based in Switzerland and Singapore. Each city’s scores are calculated using conventional economic and quality-of-life indicators, but also the availability of technologies, such as mobility apps or online transit ticketing, as well as public attitudes toward the use of CCTVS and facial recognition in crime prevention. Cities whose residents express more acceptance of these technologies receive higher scores (‘Smart City Observatory’).
Yet as the Sidewalk saga demonstrated, many people felt deeply uncomfortable about the prospect of fitting out urban spaces with the kinds of technologies that have, in the words of Harvard professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff, enabled ‘the wholesale destruction of privacy’ (Zuboff 2021).
The global pandemic, however, cast a pall over the sprawling smart city industry as local governments facing economic fallout from COVID-19 put their spending plans on hold. Some firms that had bet very heavily on smart city tech, like Cisco, decided to exit in the midst of the crisis. ‘Smart cities are a hard sell,’ a former Cisco director told Connected, a real estate trade publication. ‘The return on investment can be hard to quantify, and stitching together disparate smart city technologies can appear daunting. Even basic things like public WiFi have been difficult.’
Despite such moves by leading tech corporations, society’s reliance on digital technology soared during the pandemic, and the consequences of these seismic shifts will have a significant impact on cities in the years to come. Which should come as little surprise: throughout history, infectious disease outbreaks have both ruined cities and triggered enormous changes in public health, social supports, culture, and so on. Digital connectivity, in the form of specific applications such as e-commerce or video-conferencing, was already altering urban space before the pandemic, and there’s good reason to believe this process has accelerated. Will cities, downtowns, retail strips, movie theatres, etc., survive? And how will the post-pandemic city and its institutions look, feel, and behave in the era of climate crisis?
These are the questions for the next generation of city-dwellers, idealists and otherwise.