As cities saw value in using smart city technology to improve municipal operations, John Lorinc was drawn into reporting on them.
The Toronto journalist received an Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy in 2019 and spent a year researching his book, Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias. It focusses on the development of sets of technologies that enable humans to live together in concentrated areas as well as the long-standing desire to improve and perfect cities.
Smart technology offers an “inherently utopian promise” that technology could observe activity in a city and then apply sophisticated computing to find improvements. Large hardware suppliers and global tech firms as well as large municipalities, such as Barcelona, New York City and Songdo, South Korea, advanced it. The applications were for mobility (such as adaptive traffic control), government operations (like providing citizens information), security/policing (including facial recognition), energy/climate (such as smart lighting), democratic engagement (including virtual public engagement tools) and planning and development (with computer-assisted design.)
Lorinc explains the evolution of smart cities is the latest chapter in an 8000-year-old story about cities. He said the first part of Dream States is about civic technology that allowed cities to grow and make them liveable. He referenced key structural innovations in architecture, some of which we take for granted now, including glass and rebar. Then there is civil engineering and urban planning with the introduction of concrete, cement, bridges, roads, asphalt along with street grids, subways and steam engines.
He explained how an active civil engineering community in London between the 1600s and 1800s made that city a proving ground. Entrepreneurs recognized they could capitalize on springs near the River Thames following the Great Fire of London in 1666. Networks of pipes were created to deliver water. Wealthier citizens could subscribe to a fire company to have extinguished, which the insurance industry appreciated. This interconnected and scalable system became the basis of those used to deliver electricity, natural gas, cable networks and the internet.
Then, there was London’s Great Stink of 1858. People dumped sewage into gutters that drained into the Thames before Joseph Bazalgatte, a civil engineer, created a network of underground sewers and intersectors while public health science exploded with improvements too.
Electrical infrastructure and urban energy systems brought forward streetlights to created a sense of security to inspire nightlife.
Before the late 19th century, cities were filthy, crowded and chaotic, making them difficult places to live. Advancements reflected a growing desire to perfect and improve urban life.
Many ideas have been implemented to make cities better but each delivered unintended consequences. The garden cities of English urban planner Ebenezer Howard located commercial activity in one area, recreation in another and homes in a third leading to land use regulations and zoning, but also contributing to urban sprawl.
There was Le Corbusier’s ideas about the radiant city. The Swiss-French architect appreciated high-rises and grand boulevards, but that discouraged activity at the street level. Then, Frank Lloyd Wright encouraged the broadacre city, which sprawled out to suburbs with the amenities of cities, creating a dependency on cars. The new urbanism of the 1980s and 90s had similarities to Howard’s ideas, but developers interpreted it as simply high-end ne0-traditional residential architecture in newly built areas.
Lorinc contrasted the ideas of Robert Moses, the New York City commissioner, who valued top-down planning and modernist superblocks with Jane Jacobs’, a US-Canadian journalist and activist who promoted dense, working-class neighbourhoods with street life.
Then, there is Richard Florida, an urban studies theorist known for his concept of the creative class regenerating urban life, so, cities provide economic opportunities, but are also where creativity, capital, innovation and research and development come together.
This background helped Lorinc understand and explain smart cities, which he said are a clash between two big forces – urban utopianism and the evolution of urban technology – which raises questions for citizens, particularly about the information municipalities collect about citizens and privacy.
