Dream States

John Lorinc (2022). Dream states: Smart cities, technology, and the pursuit of urban utopias. Coach House Books, Toronto

9 smart cities … the precise definition is fuzzy and extensively debated among academics

10 The story of city-building, in many ways, is also about the collision between utopian dreams and engineered solutions

10 hundreds of tech companies … have gravitated toward the multi-billion-dollar smart city industry

12 ‘urban informatics’ … the ‘inter-disciplinary application of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the service of urban communities across the globe.’

13 disruption … was an investor-friendly euphemism for the tech sector’s compulsion to overwhelm, wreck, and monopolize whatever stood in its way

14 The city is one of humanity’s oldest inventions

15 Thomas More, the English social philosopher, coined the term utopia in his 1516 treatise envisioning a just society

17 ‘smart’ … The phrase … is malleable enough to mean many things to many 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,’ … 2020 German study … (Drapalova & Weigrich) … the tech industry seized on the ‘smart city’ label

18 many people felt deeply uncomfortable about the prospect of fitting out urban spaces with the kinds of technologies that have … enabled the wholesale destruction of privacy ([Shoshana] Zuboff 2021)

24 slavery was underwritten by consumers and businessmen located on the other side of the Atlantic

24-25 London was not just a port of call, but a communications hub for shipping news. In fact, merchants in the late seventeenth century began congregating at a coffee house near the Tower of London, owned by a man named Edward Lloyd … evolved into … Lloyd’s of London

27 The joyless grind of life for the working class, articulated by [Friedrich] Engels and later [Jacob] Riis, also became the preoccupation of a generation of urban reformers and visionaries

28 In the years before Henry Ford began mass-producing Model Ts, two other transportation technologies were in ascendancy: bicycles and electric trams

33 concrete – made from gravel, sand, and a limestone binding agent called cement – was widely employed as a building material by the Romans … Roman concrete was weaker than modern concrete but very durable, which accounts for the resilience of monuments like the Pantheon

33-34 In the 1820s … a British bricklayer named Joseph Aspdin patented a powder he called ‘portland cement,’ which could bind aggregates into a durable concrete … About fifty years later, a California-based entrepreneur, Ernest Leslie Ransome, came up with a way of making concrete even stronger … twisted rebar

38-39 the Zhaozhou Bridge in Northern China. Built about 1,400 years ago, it is considered the world’s oldest spandrel stone bridge still in active use

39 Roman roads … design remained the most sophisticated until the advent of modern road-building technology in the late 18th and 19th centuries

39-40 the game-changing innovation in road-building … early 1800s …. ‘Not only did John Loudon McAdam’s design result in a smoother surface and carriage ride, but it was cheaper to build and lasted longer,’ … immortalized with “MacAdam” or “macadam”   

46 Alexander Cumming … patented the S-bend in 1775, and his invention ushered in the era of the flush toilets – initially known as Crappers

47-48 Joseph W. Bazalgette (1819-91), the official tasked with eliminating the Thames’ stench … a 3,200-kilometre network of underground sewers … ‘This man arguably did more for the health of Londoners in the mid-19th century, than anyone before or since’

49 London’s … water and sewage networks both encouraged urbanization and enabled its acceleration

64-65 Edward Teller … and two collaborators in a 1948 essay in the Bulletin. ‘A country like the United States … is particularly vulnerable to the devastating impact of atomic bombs’ … recommending radical de-urbanization strategies that encouraged cities of no more than 100,000 people, highly dispersed and intentionally decentralized

65 Norbert Wiener … an alternative approach … dubbed ‘life belts,’ … radial beltways encircling major American cities, which would contain vital institutions like hospitals, as well as backup infrastructure

68-69 Paul Baran … also … Donald Davies … making cities more resilient in the face of a calamitous attack … ARPANET, which would eventually evolve into the internet

72 the emergence of the digitally connected city states that now dominate the global economy – mega-regions like Shanghai, Seoul, and Manila

73 Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s, Japanese carmakers started adopting two transformative changes in their manufacturing processes: a new approach to ensuring quality control, and what would become a revolution in the way they managed inventory and suppliers … By the 1980s … Japanese and Korean manufacturers saw dramatic growth in their fortunes

74-75 In many post-industrial city regions, robust economic growth has come with increasing social disparities, income inequality, and housing shortages … At the same time, many big cities … have become magnets for … the ‘creative class’ … more tolerant, denser, and walkable

75 ‘intelligent communities,’ ‘innovation clusters,’ and …’mega-regions.’ Yet in the 2010s, a new label … Smart

81 Eric Miller … ‘The central question … is the interaction between technological systems and people systems.’

82 Sensors are fitted with small radio transmitters to send readings wirelessly

83 These devices are creating entirely new types of data-driven relationships between the private realm of the home or a business and the wider public realm of the city … Yet such applications also raise hard questions about privacy protections and the potential misuse of such sensors for surveillance or marketing purposes

84 In China, ubiquitous (closed-circuit television) CCTV surveillance and advanced facial recognition software have been extensively deployed as part of the Communist government’s security and intelligence operations … North American … police … body-worn cameras and dash cams … Drones … U.K., police drones use facial recognition software … Google’s Street View … Mobileye

85 But a rapidly spreading backlash against surveillance-oriented technologies, including those embedded in popular social media platforms, has promoted some global technology firms to halt or discontinue their facial recognition programs, among them IBM, Microsoft, and Meta/Facebook

85 the ‘internet of things’ (IoT)

86 [Gilad] Rosner … ‘… The more sensors, the more surveillance.’

87 ‘The basic concern is to avoid cities or districts becoming self-contained, “locked-in” islands, captive of a single company that holds all the enabling technology,’ a European Commission urban regeneration think tank cautioned in a 2016 blog post

87 artificial intelligence … AI

88-89 The principle of technological openness can be viewed as a kind of holy grail for smart cities … the core idea is that the benefits of emerging technologies and other smart systems don’t just flow into private coffers … Advocates of progressive smart cities say that municipalities, regions, or other institutions must employ an open-standards approach to provide interoperability … The use of open-source software is also regarded as an essential principle in the development of democratic smart cities … ‘open data portals.’ 

90 so-called 5G (or fifth generation) wireless networks … uses lower radio frequencies … 5G networks need a much denser concentration of cell towers and transmitters … ‘low latency,’ meaning very little time elapses between the detection of a signal and the response to it generated in a remote computer system

90 China is home to sixteen of the top twenty most surveilled cities in the world

91 video-conferencing platforms … Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams … both good and bad … online learning … Yet for all the innovation, the depersonalized experience of virtual learning left much to be desired for both teachers and students … Telemedicine … enjoyed a massive resurgence

92-94 Smart Energy Systems … ‘intelligent transportation systems’ … A 2018 analysis by McKinsey Global Institute concluded that transportation-related smart systems yielded the greatest gains for cities. ‘We found that these tools could reduce fatalities by 8 to 10 per cent, accelerate emergency response times by 20 to 35 per cent, [and] shave the average commute by 15 to 20 per cent.’

95-96 Shoshanna Saxe … Smart cities … ‘will be exceedingly complex to manage, with all sorts of unpredictable vulnerabilities. There will always be a place for new technology in our urban infrastructure, but we may find that often, “dumb” cities will do better than smart ones … Rather than chasing the newest shiny smart-city technology … we should redirect some of that energy toward building excellent dumb cities – cities planned and built with best-in-class, durable approaches to infrastructure and the public realm … Tech has a place in cities, but that place is not everywhere’

98 The utopian fantasy is that cities are potentially knowable, thanks to the omniscience of technologies that also purport to play the role of oracle, predicting the future, in all its granularity, and ordering up the necessary course corrections along the way. 

    Yet the relentless serendipity of cities is, as the jokes goes, a feature, not a bug

100 New York … Central Park … Frederick Law Olmsted made the case that working people living in crowded conditions required access to natural outdoor spaces for health

101 In many cities around the world, two types of urban development became ubiquitous in the decades after World War II … One was the mass production of the high-rise apartment building … These apartment complexes sprung up within and on the edges of many big cities … The second form enabled the growing middle class to move into suburban enclaves. Low-density … served by arterial roads and shopping malls … required residents to own private vehicles

102 Utopian urbanism anticipates the emergence of the smart city movement, with its rationalist premise of using technology to eradicate the ills of the city while optimizing its economic and social prospects … Le Corbusier

104 Beginning in the 1850s, von Haussmann embarked on an extremely ambitious reconstruction of central Paris

108 zoning as a mode of municipal rule-making is scarcely a century old … Despite the egalitarian values espoused by utopian urbanists … zoning regulations served to exclude racialized minorities and played a devastating role in isolating poor Black and Hispanic neighbourhoods in American cities … Michael Lang observed in a 2010 paper, ‘… modern town planning … a means of developing and delivering a series of professional techniques appropriate to the maintenance of the prevailing capitalist system’

110 postwar metropolitan regions swapped out the problems associated with extreme density for the problems that flow from extreme sprawl

111-112 the ‘fifteen-minute city’ … 2015 … Carlos Moreno … a utopian response to the stresses of twenty-first-century cities in the era of climate change … Moreno’s thinking … has been attacked as elitist … Moreno’s vision is built on a foundation of sweeping assumptions about how cities should yield to a set of tidy planning ideals that have little to do with the messy ways in which city-dwellers actually live their lives

120 Rob Kitchin … The dashboard … is a visualization tool that ‘tracks the performance of the city with respect to twelve key areas – jobs and economy, transport, environment, policing and crime, communities, housing, health, and tourism.’ … a new species of urban information-gathering system

129 Data is both the opportunity and the flashpoint in most conversations about smart city technology

130 As the global tech sector well knows, data has enormous monetary value, especially in large batches – the new oil, as the cliché goes … ‘The algorithm is where the value is,’ observes Natasha Tusikov … Kurtis McBride … By the 2030s … most urban infrastructures will be fitted out with technology that generates data with significant commercial value. Either private firms will own and profit from it, or the value in those pools of urban data can be used to advance the public good … ‘Government officials … aren’t thinking about this.’

132 ‘The whole idea of the smart city is that every interface is a data collection space,’ says Anna Artyushina … We already live in a world that’s programmed to track our movements, our consumer habits, our online behaviour, and our digital interactions … Personal data is harvested, aggregated, analyzed, and then sold or shared, often without our knowledge or explicit consent

145-146 Rotterdam’s green roof infrastructure is all about water and keeping as much rainwater runoff as possible out of aging, overtaxed sewers in order to prevent flooding … Paul van Roosmalen … a ‘green-blue grid.’ … When there’s rain in the forecast, the reservoirs can be drained automatically. Then, during heavy weather, they can store rainwater, reducing pressure and flooding in the sewer system

147 Climate change is, in significant measure, a consequence of the twin historical forces of industrialization and urbanization … Mass consumerism and environmental degradation caused by car-oriented sprawl accelerated fossil fuel dependence, plastic waste, and the overuse of carbon-intensive city building materials, like cement, concrete, and asphalt.

    Yet post-industrial cities, with their economies of scale and concentrated populations, have also generated a wide range of sustainable innovations, products, and approaches to planning and development

147 when inexpensive goods produced in the Global South are purchased by consumers in affluent countries, all that transnational trade effectively allow the North to shift emissions, air pollution, and ecological destruction to coal-dependent megacities in Asia and the oceans that serve as the primary means of shipping goods around the globe

150 residential space heating, with electric air-source heat pumps replacing furnaces powered by natural gas or fuel oil

151 so-called ‘vehicle-to-grid’ systems

152 electricity … generated using low-carbon technologies like wind, hydro, or nuclear … rooftop solar panels, stationary batteries, and [electric vehicles] EVs

153 ‘Passive House’ school of design

154 regulation has been consistently shown to drive innovation

155 In Vancouver … the Step Code … more energy-efficient products, such as … ‘tall timber’ construction – basically, buildings constructed from highly engineered wooden beams and pillars instead of carbon-intensive materials like concrete and steel

156 Dutch policy makers and companies to swap out the top-down approach in favour of a more grassroots philosophy that features extensive public engagement, citizen-science projects, and applied research … a democratic approach to smart urbanization that aligns with a U.N. social development goal (#11) about resilient, sustainable, and inclusive cities

157-158 TADA.city, a network of European organizations that have pledged adherence to six core principles for digital city initiatives (inclusive, locally focused, controlled by residents, monitored, transparent, and broadly accessible)

159 flaw … ‘”Smart city” technology is steeped in solutionism,’ argued Rebecca Williams … ‘… rhetoric and promotional materials are often couched with the promise of what it could solve rather than what it has demonstrably solved in similar instances.’ 

161-162 ‘mobility as a service,’ or MaaS … digital urban mobility, which is, arguably, the single most sought-after prize in the sprawling smart city industry

163 ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft – which, pre-pandemic, fueled congestion and eroded transit usage

166 cities are defined, in fundamental ways, by their transportation networks

166 the arrival of ride-hailing companies saw rail ridership fall … and bus ridership drop … the profits earned by ride-hailing firms comes directly at the expense of the public purse

167 e-scooter firms like Lime and Bird … a spike in collision-related injuries

168 [autonomous vehicles] AVs will likely be several orders of magnitude more disruptive than either e-scooters or ride hailing

171 According to a World Economic Forum analysis published in late 2021, investment in AVs slowed during the pandemic, and the market shifted to the commercialization of self-driving delivery and freight vehicles, as well as more specialized industrial applications such as autonomous forklifts and pallet movers developed for cavernous distribution centres

177 the combination of powerful digital mapping tools and emerging types of autonomous vehicles raises the prospect of the financialization of public spaces in order to serve the interests of large corporations … Likewise, if parcel delivery companies become reliant on the use of sidewalks, it’s not difficult to imagine that they’ll eventually demand that municipalities provide more and better access … an exercise in weighing interests that could easily rank the desires of residents well below the demands of big tech

180-181 Palantir, a surveillance software powerhouse … has generated billions in revenues … has been condemned by Amnesty International for failing to safeguard the human rights of people who are caught up in its surveillance web.

    A great deal more digital watching takes place in the service of commerce … Shoshana Zuboff … 2019 … surveillance capitalism is ‘a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, predictions, and sales.’

181 Robert Muggah … 2021 essay in Foreign Policy entitled ‘”Smart” Cities Are Surveilled Cities’ he wrote with Greg Walton

183-184 data-gathering digital technologies … are packed with features: they can do many things, not all of which are known ahead of time … ‘function creep’

185 Gilad Rosner … advocates for the use of the ‘precautionary principle’ in the deployment of new technology

186 ‘surveillance creep,’ Ellen P. Goodman

188 Barbara Swartzentruber … these technologies have become intensely polarizing

189 maintenance decisions don’t treat all neighbourhoods equally. The law of unintended consequences

190 as quantum physicists postulated well over a century ago, the act of observation is neither neutral nor passive. Rather, observation itself can alter that which is being observed

202-203 the stats cited by ShotSpotter in support of its claims had not been peer-reviewed or exposed to more ‘robust’ research evaluations … ShotSpotter hasn’t allowed independent verification of its accuracy claims

205 In his book on big data policing, Andrew Ferguson writes that local governments should start at first principles, and urges police forces and civilian oversight bodies to address five fundamental questions, ideally in a public forum:

·       Can you identify the risks that your big data technology is trying to address?

·       Can you defend the inputs into the system (accuracy of data, soundness of methodology)?

·       Can you defend the outputs of the system (how they will impact policing practice and community relationships)?

·       Can you test the technology (offering accountability and some measure of transparency)?

·       Is police use of the technology respectful of the autonomy of the people it will impact?

207 Ellen Goodman … The upshot is that Ottawa’s low-key but thorough approach could point to a way for citizens to shine some light into the black box that is big data policing

210 China … is planning to build five hundred smart cities in coming years (Das 2020) … India’s one hundred smart cities ‘mission’

213-214 Songdo … a South Korean economic development region … ‘More than a decade on from its inception the city is less than a quarter full,’ observed a 2018 report in This Week in Asia

214-215 Sarah Moser. Forest City is nominally part of Malaysia … ‘… is a completely private city with no publically provided services,’

225 Governance is a somewhat nebulous term that orbits around the politics of smart city technology, frequently cited but rarely defined with any degree of precision

226-228 So what are we talking about when we talk about smart city governance? … The City of Toronto … Municipal officials developed a Digital Infrastructure Plan, which laid out five core guiding principles, including equity and inclusion; effective local government; social, economic, and environmental benefits; privacy and security; and democracy and transparency

232 Mark S. Fox … 2020: ‘The adoption of standards is a governance dimension that has received little or no attention in the media, yet it represents the Achilles heel on the path to smart cities.’

234 2020 … Albert Meijer … smart city tech … the more ambitious ones have a way of falling short. ‘It is a technology looking for a problem rather than the other way around,’

240-243 COVID-19 … contact-tracing … Google’s community mobility reports … both failed to deliver … One of the most compelling, and least gimmicky, involved ‘waste-water surveillance,’ … Ottawa was an early mover … The results were also more comprehensive than testing because they captured non-symptomatic infection and infections among people who didn’t bother getting tested

245 key transmission nodes, such as international airports, shipping ports, travel hubs, and public gathering spaces

246 ‘wastewater-based epidemiology can support public health policy as an established surveillance tool for emerging infectious diseases and biological threats’ (Sharara et al. 2021)

247 Florence Nightingale … 1854 … soldiers were far more likely to die from infections picked up in hospital settings than from the injuries they sustained on the battlefield

247-248 John Snow … two curious details emerged … one, that many of the victims lived or worked near a water pump over a well on Broad Street; and two, that workers at a nearby brewery seemed less likely to fall ill or die … Snow recommended to local authorities that they remove the handle of the Broad Street pump. That decision … halted the outbreak

248-249 Vienna during the late 1840s. Ignaz Semmelweis … ‘Wash your hands,’

249 early 1860s … Louis Pasteur … Robert Koch … ‘germ theory.’ … pasteurization

250 chlorination marked ‘one of the ten greatest public health achievements of the twentieth century’

251 the interior atmosphere of buildings. Jeffrey Siegel … an ‘incredibly neglected’ issue in terms of public health policy

253 the Great Smog of London in December 1952, which killed around 12,000 people … ‘the Great Smog is considered a turning point in environmental history’

254 The Black Death … 1347 to 1353 stands ‘unchallenged as the greatest catastrophe in human history.’

254 the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20 – an H1N1 virus … killed at least 50 million over the course of three waves

255-256 COVID-19 could, in fact, be described as history’s first technology pandemic … some epidemiologists regarded the proliferation of anti-vaxxer/anti-masker propaganda as one of the key drivers of infection rates … we adapted rapidly … video-conferencing, document-sharing, electronic funds transfer, streaming, e-commerce, automation, 3-D printing, and secure cloud-based computing, among others

256 if smart city technologies were all about managing the pressure of proximity, then pandemic technologies addressed the opposite, providing pragmatic solutions that enabled part of society and the economy to function in a condition of enforced dispersion

258 Complaints about virtual meetings and online classes were one of the most common subjects of discussion during the pandemic

262 Business investment in automation was accelerated by pandemic restrictions, labour shortages, absences due to illness, and a host of other factors

265 ‘… there is a significant gap between the myth of the smart city and its actual performance as a healthy or happy city’ (Sassen & Kourtit 2021) 

265 ‘How can you become a smart city when thousands of your residents can’t connect to the Internet to participate in online learning, to participate in remote work, to do online job training in order to even qualify for unemployment benefits, or to participate in interviews remotely?’ wondered Jordan Davis

265 the notion of ‘smartness’ seems not just limiting but blinkered – a utopian brand fuelled by the profit motive and engineered solutions that don’t properly address the human challenge of city life downplaying the crucial role of urban governance in the adoption of transformative systems (Joss et al. 2019). Perhaps we need a better label – one that accounts for inclusiveness and social justice, as well as the most enduring qualities of cities: resilience, adaptability, ingenuity, diversity, serendipity, endurance, and, critically, a sense of place … ‘Smart’ may be necessary, but it will never be sufficient