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Journalism and the Smart City

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A Smarter Toronto
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Abstract

With Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project, Toronto joined other cities where smart city discourse has circulated and projects have been developed, interpreted, and studied. Situated at the intersection of media, technocultural, urban, and journalism studies, this book examines the discursive struggle over the production of a future, hybrid urban space. My overall thesis is that the news media’s production of discourse was imbricated in the process of assembling a smart city project. In this chapter, I begin by calling attention to the dynamics of mediatized controversy. In the second section, I discuss why attending to journalism and the smart city is an important move in urban media studies. In the third section, I make the case that quality journalism mattered for urban learning. In the fourth section, I present a synopsis of the Quayside project story that accents how the project’s trajectory to assemble a novel neighbourhood assemblage had significance for technological policy and politics. In the final section, I set out the work to be done in the rest of the book to show how local journalism was an influential mediator of this project for the city of Toronto.

No one, wise Kublai, know better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it. And yet between the one and the other there is a connection.

Italo Calvino (1974), Invisible Cities

By definition, a technological project is a fiction, since at the outset it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase.

Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Greenfield (2017), the idea of “the Stacks” originated with Bruce Sterling as a way to characterize a strategy of vertical integration. Google, as the dominant search-engine company that was folded into Alphabet, became one of the foremost “Stacks” of products and services that is, at the same time, a “particular assembly of forces and capabilities” (176).

  2. 2.

    For a very useful critique, see Morozov (2019).

  3. 3.

    Element AI’s report was completed but never released by Waterfront Toronto. My request to obtain it under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act was denied by Waterfront Toronto’s Director of Government Relations. Because the document was never completed after Sidewalk Labs withdrew from the project, they determined it would not be released because their Freedom of Information Policy provides for the refusal of working papers.

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Correspondence to Bob Hanke .

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© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Hanke, B. (2024). Journalism and the Smart City. In: A Smarter Toronto. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41546-3_1

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