For some reason, I expected more a history of urban design, but this book focused more on cool companies and implementations that the author was a part of. Not my cup of tea, do not let that deter you. If you have any interest at all in urban policy or the future of city planning, this one could be for you.

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.

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 It will be outdated, but it also may serve as a curiosity because it's a glimpse at present day handwringing / anxiety.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.

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. ( )

I am currently in graduate school working on some issues involving smart cities, and this book is a welcome add to my research. It is an excellent introduction to the concept of smart cities - a concept that does not have a single universally agreed-upon definition, but one that many people who live in cities have already experienced. It is not a STEM college textbook laying out how specific smart city technologies are planned or networked. You aren't going to find IP subnetting recommendations or routing tables here. Instead it's going to be more of a description of what people generally think smart cities are, some of the technologies that go into them, and how they work.

Some cities may have big official declarations of "Smart Cleveland 2025" or "Smart Lagos 2030" or whatever, others may just integrate advanced technology into the management of their cities without making a big fuss about it. This book lays out some of the ways that can happen, some of the technologies that can be used in it (lots of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, various other sensors, big data, smart infrastructure, etc), and various ethical or legal discussions that have to happen.

One important issue that the book touches on is that technology is a tool, not an end in itself, and most likely cannot solve underlying problems simply by being installed. The discussion surrounding ShotSpotter is mentioned in this book and is a perfect example of this problem. In theory, ShotSpotter helps cops identify and presumably solve violent crimes. In practice, there are numerous problems with the company, its technology, and the way police departments have asked the company to fiddle with reports produced by the technology. One big problem is the placing of these systems in communities that are already targeted by police for being lower income and not white, which only exacerbates existing racism and classism. This technology, like others used in smart cities, cannot solve what is fundamentally a human problem instead of an engineering one. ( )