T.F. Tierney Publishes on Toronto’s Smart City
In this work Tierney takes a close look at the recent history of smart cities and their resultant entanglement with information capitalism, data collection, and data privacy.
The paper examines the City of Toronto’s recent award to Sidewalk Lab (née Google) for design services, which has sparked a heated controversy among urban planners and citizens alike. Toronto’s decision not only signals a different model of professional practice, but it also represents a conceptual shift away from citizen toward urban consumer. By engaging a private technology company, one that passively captures data on its customers and then sells that data to third parties, Toronto’s smart city points to a significant change in the understanding and practice of contemporary urban planning and design.
Architecture_Media_Politics_Society is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, open-access journal focused on social and political interpretations of the built environment.