John Lorinc

Mr. Lorinc's book is great for the subset of us who get excited about urban planning. He provides a detailed, yet readable, analysis of the history of urban planning. Much better than several textbooks I've had to slog through. A few things that the book could tweak a bit though: after the great background section, the book lacks a clear focus and moves from issue to issue without a central thesis. He also focuses heavily on the Toronto-based Sidewalk Labs project throughout the book to the point where it ends up almost being a case study with some superfluous information. It's also very easy to notice that Lorinc is Canadian as much of his material is from 'up North' - that's not a bad thing at all, some things may just be a bit unfamiliar to US-based readers. Overall, a good read for urban planners interested in the past, present and future of the field.… (altro)

After setting stage by describing the Toronto Sidewalk Lab’s trajectory to cancellation, Lorinc's first chapters serve to contextualize subject as one of infrastructure, re: bridges, sewers, etc, as driven by each period’s most modern technology.

The subsequent shift from history / story-telling to the dive into contemporary tech is abrupt.

P95: tech as tools, not stand-alone solutions
P98: “The utopian fantasy is that cities are potentially knowable thanks to the omniscience…”
P159: “ Its 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.”

P211: “entrepreneurial urbanization”

The book presents, overall, a snapshot in time. It will be outdated, but it also may serve as a curiosity because it's a glimpse at present day handwringing / anxiety.
Despite Lorinc staying pretty even-handed in his descriptions of contemporary smart cities, the aggregate feeling one gets from reading about them all (ch9) is one of dread.… (altro)

I'm not a city or regional planner and I picked up this book because I've been interested in the phenomenon of smart cities and their purported attempts to make my life easy and smooth. It took me a while to get through this book despite finding the general content and thesis interesting, and for a while, I couldn't figure out why.

I picked it back up a week ago (and pushed myself to finish the last few chapters) and realized why I'd needed so many breaks. This book is written like a series of articles in an anthology, and could have worked as a monthly magazine column on smart cities. Even so, the chapters read like (well-researched) literature reviews and I didn't get a sense of the author's journey or opinions on each issue. I still liked the book because I learned something new about smart cities and technology but I can't say that I enjoyed the process of doing so or of reading the prose itself.… (altro)