Smart Cities, Technology and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias

Summary: How smart are smart cities? It's a simple question. But it isn't exactly easy to answer. While smart technologies promise a safer city, and a sustainable and efficient way of living an urban life, the hype around smart cities can be a distraction from truly vital urban infrastructure, according to Toronto-based urban affairs journalist John Lorinc. In his book, Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias, Lorinc explores the future of urban planning and smart cities. He argues that while there's a role for smart city technology in improving urban life, cities are messy, complicated human environments that depend on physical infrastructure, architecture and civil engineering. And the massive data collection and digital surveillance behind smart city technology raises alarms about privacy and how Big Tech companies use that data. Lorinc's Dream States won the 2022 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy, an annual award presented by the Writers Trust of Canada honouring non-fiction that "advances and influences policy debates." And he just recently won the inaugural Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award.