As the 2019-2020 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, John Lorinc studied the multitude of issues related to this question: expectations of personal privacy; how urban planning works; impact of tech on equity; and ways that communities can organize and engage in local democracy. His series, Building Smart Smart Cities, was published in January 2021 in the Toronto Star.
Now, Coach House Books has published a book by John based on his fellowship research, Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias.
He will be in conversation at the Toronto Reference Library on Monday September 19, 2022 at 7pm, as part of their On Civil Society series. Register here.
You can also read John’s original series here in PDF form.