Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

DREAM STATES

John Lorinc

Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias

A look at 21st-century city-building. Is the utopian "smart city" within our grasp?

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.

JOHN LORINC is a journalist and editor. He reports on urban affairs, politics, business, technology, and local history for a range of media, including the Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Walrus, Maclean's, and Spacing, where he is senior editor. John is the author of three books, including The New City (Penguin, 2006), and has coedited four antholo- gies for Coach House Books. John is the recipient of the 2019/2020 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. He lives in Toronto.

Available products
Book Published 2022-08-01 by Coach House Books - Toronto (CA)
Book Published 2022-08-01 by Coach House Books - Toronto (CA)

Comments

John Lorinc invites readers to consider how technology - specifically smart city tech - fits into the overall city-building equation. For him, smart cities are not a shiny new invention, but a continuation of an aspira- tional and historical trajectory toward 'utopia.' He argues that the pursuit of utopia must not be naively extracted from the political, socio-economic, spatial, physical, cultural layers that compose a city. Rather, drawing upon cases from around the world, he offers a framework for thinking about the future of urban living. Lorinc compels readers to consider the future of cities not only in the post-pandemic period, but also amid an accelerating and worsening climate crisis.

This book covers pressing, timely geopolitical issues affecting every city around the world.

Utopia may be the oldest grift in the city-building business... As digital dilettantes try to sell us on a software overhaul, John Lorinc provides us an indispensible and flawless guide to the must-haves and never-agains of the smart city.

Winner of the Writers Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy Winner of the Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award Shortlisted for the Donner Prize for Public Policy

Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias takes us on a fascinating journey across world cities to show how technology has shaped them in the past and how smart city technology will reshape them in the future. This book is essential reading for policy makers, researchers, and practitioners interested in understanding the opportunities and challenges of smart city technology and what it means for city building.

John Lorinc's incisive analysis in Dream States reminds us that the search for urban utopia is not new. Throughout the book, Lorinc underscores the fact that a gamut of urban innovations - from smart city megaprojects to e-government to pandemic preparedness tools - only provide promise when scrutinized together with the political, economic, social, and physical complexities of urban life.