Ideas - Smart Cities, Technology and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Nothing seems to make a city politician’s eyes light up like the promise of the smart city. In his book, Dream States, journalist John Lorinc questions whether smart technologies live up to the hype and whether ultimately smart cities serve the interests of city dwellers or big tech companies. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 19, 2023.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. When the precogs declare a victim and a killer, their name is embedded in the grain of wood. Since each piece is unique, the shape and grain is unique. The shape and grain is impossible to forge. The 2002 movie Minority Report. The pre-crime unit in mid-21st century Washington, D.C.

uses foreknowledge from psychics called precogs to apprehend potential murderers before they actually kill anyone. I'm sure you all understand the legalistic drawback to pre-crime methodology. Here we go again. Look, I'm not with the ACLU on this, Jeff. But let's not kid ourselves. We are arresting individuals who have broken no law. But they will. The commission of the crime itself is absolute metaphysics. The precogs see the future and they're never wrong.

Proponents of smart city technology say that it could also prevent crime and address a host of other urban problems, but not through psychics. Instead, it would use data collection, sensors, and computing power. A convection of savvy marketing, software applications, and a dizzying range of electronic devices, all meant to somehow optimize cities, thereby solving or at least ameliorating problems from congestion to emissions to street violence. John Lawrence is an award-winning Toronto author and journalist who specializes in urban issues. His latest book, Dream States, Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban

Utopias, won the 2022 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. The utopian fantasy that cities are potentially knowable thanks to the omniscience of technologies that also purport to play the role of Oracle, predicting the future in all its granularity and ordering up the necessary course corrections along the way. The most notorious example of a smart city proposal in Canada was Quayside, the brainchild of Google's urban planning subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs. Now is the ideal time to start figuring out how do we leverage technology to make cities better. The plan was to transform a moribund swath of Toronto's waterfront into a beautiful five-hectare neighbourhood shaped by cutting-edge technology.

Sidewalk Labs avoided explicitly calling Quayside a smart city. But its announcement of the project in 2017 had smart city rhetoric all over it. This initiative will bring together the local tech talent and entrepreneurial clusters that exist within Toronto, giving them opportunity to actually take their new solutions and go to scale and to commercialize in a way that we've never seen before in Canada. We have an opportunity to fundamentally redefine what urban life can actually be. Sidewalk Labs' proposal was backed by the municipal, provincial and federal governments. But skeptics and critics were concerned about privacy infringement

and wondered who all this technology and data collection would actually benefit. Citizens and urban quality of life? Or Google? Sidewalk Labs terminated the Quayside project in 2020, citing uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. But those suspicions still linger, and even inspired a satirical play about Quayside called The Master Plan,

staged by Toronto's Crows Theatre. Imagine a city with safe streets, breathable air, and walkable sidewalks built from the internet up. Imagine Quayside, Toronto's neighbourhood of tomorrow that knows what you need before you know you need it. Picture tall timber skyscrapers sequestering carbon, modular streets rearranging themselves based on traffic, digitally deployed raincoats on buildings to keep you dry, and maybe a few flying cars. It's time to step into the future. Join us and optimize every aspect of your life.

Buy your tickets today. That's the Sidewalk Labs, former headquarters. Oh, so we're going to go there? Yeah. Without getting killed, hopefully? John Lawrence and I cross a busy downtown street on the waterfront, on our way to the former site of the Quayside proposal. The area is still an undeveloped post-industrial space,

disconnected from the rest of the city. This low-slung blue building, which is now a budget rent-a-car, was the kind of Toronto pied-à-terre of sidewalk labs when they were proposing their big smart city project. And so in this building, they had a kind of a display area where you could go in and you could kind of check out their plans and their technologies. And they used to have visitors from all over the world to come and look at this.

And so this area has been targeted for redevelopment for about 25 years. And incrementally, it's achieving that. And so, you know, if you walked along here 20 years ago, it was pretty much nothing. It was lots of low-slung buildings, and many of them derelict. And now there are a lot of mid-rise buildings. The George Brown, which is a community college in Toronto, has a campus down here. There are some office buildings, condos, so all sorts of things. And that's the quayside site that sidewalk labs was trying to redevelop is kind of at the end of that progression of new buildings

and so they saw that as a huge opportunity because to sort of retrofit a built-up part of a city with a lot of this kind of technology in a concentrated way is not straightforward at all. It's easier to just kind of build tabula rasa. And so this area was going to be kind of a hub of pretty big buildings, and they were going to be wired with all sorts of connectivity, kind of smart city applications. So one of the ideas they had was that they were all going to be connected by a series of tunnels. And so there was no cars in this area. So if you were going to get a delivery from Amazon, for example, it would come into a loading bay, would put the box on this automated dolly,

which would go through the tunnels, find your apartment somehow, take it up the elevator and drop it at your front door. They were going to have a lighting system in the roadway, which could sense the amount of traffic and the lights would show where the lanes were. So in periods where there was low traffic, which is in Toronto never, the pedestrian area would be wider, you know, as marked by these lights, and then narrower when there was a lot of traffic. On the website of Sidewalk Labs, it says that they wanted a, quote,

new model of inclusive urban development. But of course, the language that is most often used is that, you know, it would be a smart neighbourhood or a smart city. What made it a smart city? It was going to be a dense neighborhood that they said would be built from the internet up. There would be a lot of sensors that would be gathering information about people and vehicles moving through public space.

There would be a lot of sensors monitoring energy consumption and water usage. Where are those sensors exactly? Everywhere, in all sorts of places. What they do is they gather information, they digitize it, and it creates this stream of data that can be analyzed and used to create different applications. The most important word in the name of this company is labs

because what they wanted to do was build this neighborhood but then use it as a kind of a test site for all these new technologies that they were going to develop. And with the development of those technologies, they could sell those algorithms and different types of software and different types of sensors and systems to other cities that are looking to do the same kind of thing. So that was their, I guess, the payoff for them.

But what was the vision they were trying to sell to people who might live there? I think that the idea was not dissimilar from what you find in other sort of high-density neighborhoods in downtown Toronto. It's like theoretically close to transit. It's on the waterfront. There are lots of people living near the shores of Lake Ontario.

It's very urban and dense. They wanted it to be sort of car-free and with lots of sort of e-mobility. And it had that kind of urban promise plus tech. You'd have all sorts of smart appliances in your unit and that you could control them remotely and all of that kind of thing, plus these systems and algorithms that they were developing, a lot of which were designed to kind of make the area operate more smoothly, more responsively, so traffic lights would be responsive

to the amount of traffic that was flowing and the number of people crossing. So the idea was to use all this tech to make, that it would deal with these urban issues in a more efficient way. But what you're saying is they were theoretical? Some of the technologies they were proposing exist, and others they were developing, and they wanted to prototype them here. If you wanted to live in a building like in a community like this, you would be sort of participating in the testing of these new smart city technologies. We walk away from the site along busy Queens Quay, looking for a quieter, perhaps greener kind of place to sit down and chat.

If it had actually gone through, could we visually tell that it was a smart city? No. This was an interesting question that came up when they were proposing this area, was that there would be a lot of public space monitoring, like there would be a lot of sensors and cameras and this kind of thing. And there were some academics who were advising Waterfront Toronto. They said, well, how do you know when you've walked into this area and suddenly data is being gathered on you?

Like we're walking down a Toronto street. As far as I know, we're not being surveilled. But that would be different inside that smart city area. And so the question is, well, have you given your permission, you know, to be captured in some way? And do you know what that information is going to be used for? So these were actually quite confounding questions. A bit further down the street and toward the lake, some green space comes into view. You know, over the course of 30 years, you've seen this sort of growing recognition that the waterfront is not the place where you just throw garbage and sewer water,

which is the way Toronto treated its waterfront for many, many decades. And Toronto treated its waterfront for many, many decades. We approach Sherbourne Common, a sudden oasis of trees, benches, a fountain, dogs playing, people hanging out on a once desolate stretch of the waterfront. One of the reasons that Waterfront Toronto decided to put it here was to attract development, and it was successful. It worked. so green space leads to well you know high quality public space that's the but for generations this was completely industrial it was not accessible to the public

you know there's a fair amount of life down here. It didn't exist before all this development occurred. This is a boardwalk promenade, and one of the city agencies is extending the boardwalk out into the lake so it'll be even wider. It's a great view. It doesn't stink. You know, when I was a kid, you came to the lake, it stank, right? Yeah, it still does in some spots. Yeah, yeah.

We find a place to sit. The harbour and Toronto Island stretch out before us. It's almost like Regent's Park in London. But even a beautiful setting like this, a lakefront, tree-lined promenade that feels a world away from fibre optic cables, wouldn't be a refuge from data-g data gathering sensors, not in a smart city. It's striking how the term smart city has become synonymous with harvesting data from citizens

and putting it to unapproved uses. As John Lawrence explains, everything revolves around data. Well, for one thing, it's very cheap to collect data. The sensors that collect air quality data and water quality and traffic movement, all of that, it's very inexpensive. And there's this whole history of the big online retailers. They collect an enormous amount of data. They use algorithms to analyze it, to detect consumer patterns, and to push products at you, and so on. So the smart city trend really sought to sort of take that idea, which is you have all this data, you have all these algorithms that can analyze it, and can we direct that towards

the way cities function? Was there not a concern that perhaps that data would not simply be used purely to improve the place where you live, but it actually went well beyond that? Well, I mean, that really did sort of come to the fore as the Sidewalk Labs proposal was being vetted in Toronto and, you know, frankly, in lots of other places that have looked at smart city technology. Data is a very sort of amorphous term. It can mean cell phone signal from a cell tower, right? It can mean your credit card number. It can mean a visual image of you passing through a turnstile, right? There are lots of different types of data. Some of it is identifiable. Some of it you can kind of put together different pieces of data

and come up with a way of identifying somebody. And as the sidewalk proposal was being scrutinized in Toronto, and as these proposals have been scrutinized in places like Amsterdam and in Barcelona, that question about what happens to the data, whether we've given our consent as just residents to give the data and how we use. These are all very germane questions and they require a lot of debate and thought because it can be misused. Was there ever a sense in which there was a kind of bargain at play where you give up your privacy and your data, whether it identifies you or not, in exchange for a more efficient, more smooth-running urban environment? Well, I think that that trade-off totally exists in our use of social media and our

use of all sorts of websites that ask you whether they can keep cookies on you. And your cell phone. Yeah, cell phone, everything, right? And most of the time we say, okay, well, we're okay with that. People have Facebook accounts and they collect your data and use it in some way. And I think that Sidewalk Labs assumed that that would be sort of a natural transition. But when I'm buying something, that's different for me walking through a neighborhood. And does anybody need to know that I'm walking my dog on a particular route? And if so, why? And then you

get into these questions about privacy and how much data are you going to collect and, you know, unintended uses of the data. So the one sort of downstream effect is that because the federal government was very much a proponent of this plan, there have been significant efforts by the federal government to kind of advance Canada's digital privacy laws. There's new legislation about AI going through at the moment. And our legal and regulatory framework was pretty behind. So that's actually a positive legacy. Can you just kind of in a general way address what it is that city and government officials in general find so lucrative about a proposal like Sidewalk Labs? What's at the heart of their interest? This idea about creating this kind of smart community down here really surfaced in 2015, 2016.

And this is before some of the big scandals about Facebook. And it was before the bloom came off the tech rose. And I think that a lot of governments were saying to themselves that they really want the investment that the technology industry brings. They want the type of people who are employed by that industry, lots of engineers, smart people, you know, who have a lot of advanced skills, and then they sort of knock on benefits of that. So it was a wealth generator. And that was a very sexy idea in 2015 and 2016. And then it became a very unsexy idea. I guess I'm curious what the difference is

between the extensive data collection that goes on right now by big tech compared to what it would be like in a smart city. Cities sit on an enormous amount of data, building development applications and traffic counts and pretty mundane information about, you know, who signed up for what kind of summer program. And I think that the smart city industry saw all of that data as a great opportunity,

you know, to marry the algorithms and the technology with the data and see what comes up. You know, it builds on the fact that we have to hand over a lot of data to municipal governments through our property tax bills, you know, gas bills or utility bills. So we actually provide local government with a huge amount of information. When I was researching dream states, I came across an example where some smart city company had, it was some kind of security application, but they'd gotten access to the driver's licenses in one of the states in the US. And they all have like a photograph of the license holder. They were sort of scooping up all those images to create a huge database of faces. And for sure, nobody who's

gotten a driver's license in that state, I think it was Ohio, gave their permission to do that. So it kind of leaks. So it leaks. You're talking about from government. Where do you stand on the longstanding question of how distrustful we should be of the big tech companies themselves in terms of their ability to safeguard our data? Healthy skepticism is in order. And certainly the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which involved Facebook selling data to political analysts and associated with the Republican Party, was a wake-up call. And Google, which was a co-owner of Sidewalk Labs, it had a division in the UK that was doing some kind of data analysis that involved health information, and that leaked out too. And there's a problem, right? You give your health information on the understanding that it's going

to be kept confidential. Maybe back to your example of what cities do or don't do with the data. Are there fears that one would have of how that data could be used or misused in the policing context, for example. So we're sitting on a bench, which is here 24-7, obviously. And so one of the proposals that Sidewalk Labs had, and which is used in other places, is to put sensors on the benches. So, okay, so maybe you have an app that shows you where there's a free bench. But the sensor could also tell if there's somebody on this bench at 4 o'clock in the morning. And maybe the people who are living in these condos are not that crazy about people being on a bench at 4 o'clock in the morning. But what this does essentially is it creates information that didn't exist before. And so once you've created that data point, you can begin to do things with data

once you start collecting it. And so all of those questions are important to think through when you're doing something involving the public realm. If I have a Netflix account and it tells me that I might like this movie because I watched this succession of movies, I'm a customer of Netflix. I assume that they're gathering information on me. I'm not that jazzed about it, but it's different if it's in public. I mean, can data really be ever neutral?

Are there biases that are built into data that's collected and how it's used that should also give us pause about living in the kind of city that collects every bit of data about our activities? Well, so there's lots of evidence about the biases in facial recognition software, for example, and the software itself is, it's quote unquote, trained on millions of images. And if you only provide images of white people, for example, it doesn't identify people with brown skin or black skin very reliably. And this isn't well documented. You have to hope these algorithms have been trained on data that's very representative.

But the ordinary person has no way of knowing that because it's a complex technological process that happens like way off stage if somebody is mistakenly taken into custody by the police there can be huge consequences for that person so these are real questions and london in fact has is one of the cities that has the most facial recognition cameras in the world. Yeah, we'd be serviced. Is there any evidence that actually using all this data that's collected by cameras and sensors

and our cell phones actually do improve let's say public safety or waste management better than human observation? The way I look at it is that it should be a tool and not an end in itself. We rely on data in every facet of our lives, right? The data is important, but it's not the only thing that you should use.

So there are a lot of interesting digital technologies that are brought to bear in urban design to help make better quality spaces, better quality buildings. But you have to know and experience these places in real life to do it properly. And I think that that's very important. The asterisk I'd put on that is that as we transition to a low carbon energy system,

which has a lot of electricity and less sort of carbon-based energy. The technology that's required to manage grids is not something that human beings are capable of really perceiving. And there are lots of smart grid applications, which are really important in the way we get ourselves off carbon. Do you ever imagine a point at which we might get to, ourselves off carbon. Do you ever imagine a point at which we might get to, there's just so much data gathered that it becomes kind of like a digital tower of Babel. There's just too much to interpret, too much to make sense of, to actually warrant such sweeping collection. Yeah. The question that I have, you can imagine that even though the internet,

as this incredibly complicated data storage machine, is designed to sort of withstand attack, you can imagine a situation where something calamitous could happen and suddenly all the things that we take for granted are not available. So we all rely on cell phones now. We all rely on Google Maps to get around and find our next appointment. And we became dependent on it in a period of 25 years, which is a blink of an eye. And I do wonder where we'll be in 100 years

in terms of just this enormous quantities of information, at least a portion of which is my unread emails. I share that. John Lawrence is the author of Dream States, Smart Cities, Technology and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias, the winner of the 2022 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Smart city technology, sensors, data collection, algorithms, artificial intelligence,

promise to transform urban life, to make it safer and more sustainable, efficient and satisfying. And the literal nuts and bolts that cities could not exist without, they seem almost passé next to the futuristic glamour of smart cities, and kind of pedestrian compared to the big tech doctrine of disruption. compared to the big tech doctrine of disruption. Sitting on a promenade on the shores of Lake Ontario, I asked John Lawrence about the motivation behind Google's Sidewalk Labs division and his argument that smart city technology companies want to disrupt cities. I think they were actually trying to disrupt two things.

They were trying to disrupt the smart city industry, which are primarily the old school technology companies that build networks and stuff like that. This is this Silicon Valley ethos of breaking things and seeing what works and Ubers like that. And it's just the way of capitalism at this moment. And truth be told, I mean, you know, history is filled with examples of cities being disrupted by wars and by plagues and by social movements. So this is the latest one. I think that cities are very sturdy and they tend to kind of weather these things, you know, particularly if people are able to sort of speak out and participate in these important conversations. But if big technology companies are driving all of this,

as you say, is there any limit to how much of the public sphere will actually be monetized? Well, I think that one of the interesting lessons about sidewalk labs, and then there's another similar lesson in Barcelona, is that the public does have concerns about too much and too intrusive technology. And so there was a lot of pushback here, sufficient that Sidewalk Labs went away. And in Barcelona, which is sort of seen as one of the hubs of smart city technology, there was a lot of similar pushback. And so the municipality there really sought to kind of incorporate public feedback in the way it sort of adopts new types of smart city technology. So they had this

whole governance model, which is very democratic. You know, there's more public engagement there than, you know, you weren't asked what your thoughts were when the internet developed or, you know, when, you know, your credit card could suddenly start to tap, right? Nobody asked you that. So I think that's a healthy sign. But if the aim is disruption, and given the fact that Sidewalk Labs walked away from this project, what does that say about the company, but what does that say about cities? Google has this fast-fail model, and a lot of the technology companies do.

They go in big, they try something, and then if it's not working, they're not going to try to kind of keep it alive. They just kind of pull the plug on it and move on to the next thing. And I really do believe that that's what was going on here, plus the fact that they didn't feel that they were in a city that really wanted them. And disruption is important to cities. Cities can get very complacent about social inequities, about terrible housing conditions, all sorts of things.

So it's important that there are efforts to change things, right? And sometimes that change is for the better, and sometimes it's for the worse. Hopefully we live in a society where there's enough engagement in these efforts to disrupt that it's directed in a positive way, which doesn't always happen, of course. In the post-war era, our parents were all very keen on housing the suburbs with cars. And so the old core cities, which were denser, were disrupted by very sprawling suburbs, which created sprawl and carbon problems and all of that. So that was not a great example of disruption. But on the other hand,

there are examples where we're finding new ways of housing people. And if we go back to the point about whether these companies see cities as yet another way to monetize the public or the public realm, do they view people as residents and inhabitants, or do they view them as products? That's an excellent question. And I think that the problem with the Sidewalk Labs proposal was that they saw the people who are going to live in this neighborhood as somewhat less than residents and engaged members of the city, which happens.

So it's really important to have sturdy municipal institutions that can, say, speak on behalf of their residents and their residents' interest. You know, these companies have to be providing a solution to an actual problem as opposed to a solution to an invented problem. And they have to make it meaningful and respectful of the people who are sort of going to be using that technology, right? So you can't just have all your information swiped and turned into something else. That's what you call solutionism.

Solutionism. There was a ton of solutionism in the smart city world. I spent a week at a smart city conference in Barcelona, and it was like wall-to-wall solutions. It was like a lot of solutions, many of which were in search of problems. Cities can devolve into infectious disease accelerators, incubators of extremism, and zones of grotesque inequity. They are destroyed and rebuilt, expand and contract, liberate and oppress. Yet the ever-evolving social and economic theories of the city, layered one on top of the other in a seemingly chaotic heap, rest on the sturdy foundation of the civil engineering and architectural technologies that

have collectively produced the physical city. Many, in fact, are so ancient and universal that we barely acknowledge their presence, much less their relationships to the creation of the thoroughly urban, digitized world of the 21st century. So looking at the traditional city, like the way cities work, before digital technology, there were all kinds of other technological developments over the millennia that addressed the problems that we face in daily life. What stands out to you as some of the greatest technological or infrastructural advances in cities to solve some of the biggest problems?

I mean, my favorite is the flush toilet, right? solve some of the biggest problems? I mean, my favorite is the flush toilet, right? So urban development does not exist without sanitation systems and fresh water provision. So those are super important. It's civil engineering. It's not that complicated, but it's expensive and it's absolutely indispensable. Another one is elevators. Elevators and steel frame construction were two architectural technologies that emerged in the late 19th century in the United States. And they allow cities to grow up. And they allowed for skyscrapers to be lightweight as opposed to made entirely out of brick and masonry.

And you also refer to water and sewage as the original urban networks. Yeah. So I found some amazingly interesting research about the origin of freshwater service in London, which was in the 17th and 18th century. And it was like a real hotbed of civil engineering. And these were all private companies that they were selling fresh water to middle class people. And they were sort of digging these pipes and using these springs that were sort of an elevated point on the north side of the Thames. And that eventually became a network of pipes.

And so they discovered essentially the network effect for the delivery of this commodity, water, fresh water, which is quite amazing. And that was the first network. You also talk about the tension between the complexity of cities and these attempts of what you call utopian schemes or technology to tame that complexity, to simplify things. Can you talk a little bit about that, what you meant by that and why that is notable? So there have been, in the past 150 years, a bunch of thinkers and

architects and designers who have come up with these solutions to the problems of cities. And so those include, you know, too much pollution. This was like at the end of the industrial era, and the air was terrible, the water was terrible, and overcrowded housing and substandard housing. And they basically came up with these ideas for how to change cities to deal with these big problems. And their ideas were highly influential. So Le Corbusier, who was a Swiss architect, essentially came up with the idea of the high-rise, you know, the high-rise community. And you see the types of high-rise buildings that he envisioned in the early 20th century all over the world. And Frank Lloyd Wright had a vision for suburban communities that were very car-oriented. Carports. Carports and malls. And so those utopian ideas

had a lot of legs and they, you know, you could find evidence of their impact in cities all over the place. You know, some cases positive and other cases quite negative. And the problem is that utopias are never utopian really. They've always got, you know, landmines and tripwires and so on. And, you know, I prefer to think of cities the way, you know, Jay Jacobs thought of cities, which were they were complex and messy and not necessarily tidy places that really thrived on the sort of the random encounters of people kind of living their lives. Is there actually some way to predict or manage this complexity and the chaos in a way that would make cities behave differently? I mean, there are some things that are predictable, which is that cities attract people because there's economic opportunity here, there's social opportunities.

And it's incumbent upon local governments, regional governments to prepare for all of those new people. So we're having this big conversation in Canada about housing now, right? And so we just did not prepare for a lot of the immigration. And the immigration tends to end up in cities. So these are kind of basic first principles things. They're not technology dependent. They're about your understanding of the way cities work. If you don't have a lot of transit,

you're going to have a lot of traffic. If you don't have enough housing, you're going to have a lot of crowded, overpriced housing. And just, you know, as you say, it's on everybody's minds, and especially sort of the issue of affordable housing. So the solutions that politicians at different levels of government seem to cut red tape and expedite building, you know, to open up protected land.

Will those things do the trick? I think that they will begin to help. I feel like we've overcomplicated the process of building housing. There are lots of reasons for that. Some of them are perfectly good reasons. But, you know, overall, it's very difficult to put up an apartment building and it shouldn't be so difficult. And it's too subject to imponderables like, you know, global financial flows and so on. And this is because governments, not just in Canada, but lots of places have sort of decided that it was best to let markets determine the housing sector,

and it's just not worked. And they were told it wasn't going to work, ignored that advice. Now they know it's not going to work. And so I don't think that we can turn to technology or sort of complicated public-private partnerships to solve this problem. We have to, as a society, invest in housing and then we'll make progress. Are there any cities that have actually figured that out,

have managed to do that? Well, there's this weird example of Vienna. Vienna has this tradition that goes back to 1920 of a lot of investment in municipal housing. So they have a huge share of publicly owned housing. It's not a stigma. You're not seen as living in a down market environment if you live in public housing. And the reason this started is because there was a kind of revolution in municipal government in 1920. And a very socialist government came in and basically started building all this housing.

very socialist government came in and basically started building all this housing. It's very enduring. They still do this. And, you know, what people pay for their housing in a city like Vienna is like astonishingly low. So it's a good model and it's not a complicated model. You just have to, you have to invest. So clearly with the pandemic, the issue of housing has come to the fore, but there have been a whole host of other issues that have been brought into relief post-pandemic. What are some of the most glaring flaws that have been uncovered in the wake of the pandemic in your sense in a city? Well, I think that one of the things that the pandemic did was it showed a lot of people just how crummy commuting is. So we have these very large cities that are difficult to get

around in. Even cities that have a lot of transit are difficult to get around in. And then there was this segment of the population that, you know, was working at home. And so we still see this great demand for people working remotely. You know, I'm a freelancer. I've worked remotely since Ronald Reagan was a president. And I calculated that I've saved two years of life from not commuting, which is incredible. So that was enabled by a kind of smart city technology, which is this, you know, the Teams and WebEx and Google and Zoom that we've all spent so much time on. And it's also served to kind of disaggregate cities a little bit.

So the downtown business cores are not as busy. People are working closer to home. And it's going to have a big impact on the way cities function and the way people move around cities and the way retail works. So that's a big legacy, I think. Why is urban transportation such an intractable problem, not just here, but in just about every city? I think to some extent, it's a lack of political will to do two things. One is to really double down on good transit and good alternative modes of transportation, and then have the political

courage to limit the car use. I was in Madrid earlier this year, and Madrid made this decision in 2014 to really limit cars in the core area. And it's amazing. It is amazing how vibrant those car-free areas are. And then another thing that we've seen in the pandemic is this move to electric micromobility, right? So you have, you know, all the e-bikes and you have the scooters and all sorts of things. It will actually make getting around easier. It's better for the environment.

But then municipal governments have to sort of respond and say, okay, well, we can't just have the roads for cars. And there are cities like New York has vastly expanded its bike network. In Paris, vastly expanded bike network and public transit network. And in both cases, those are cities where, you know, where the municipal government said, we know this works, we know people are going to do it, we know it's not about the weather, then they did it. But we haven't had that kind of political courage here. Yeah, and it is a disruptive effect.

Yeah, and another place where there's a really good example is Montreal and Mayor Valérie Plante is doing a huge amount of that. You know, Montreal is not a warm city for much of the year. Massive bike network, investing in new transit, all with an eye to reducing car use. Really, you know, until the Second World War, cities were pretty compact, even in North America. You know, you could walk places, you could take the streetcar,

you could get by without a car. And then the car came along and there was a demand by people to have, you know, urban areas that are suited to the way that you can live your life if you rely on a car. You know, it's an iterative process. And we have to kind of dial that back now. In the aftermath of a once inin-a-century health calamity, and with another even more drastic climate crisis looming in the middle distance, the notion of smartness seems not just limiting, but blinkered. Perhaps we need a better label, one that accounts for inclusiveness and social justice,

as well as the more enduring qualities of cities. Resilience, adaptability, ingenuity, diversity, serendipity, endurance, and critically, a sense of place. When you look at the urban landscape across Canada, what are the signs that you look for in determining whether a city is actually working? I mean, I think that people should be able to live in the city without going to Herculean lengths to find housing. It's so fundamental. And that's, to me, the real acid

test at the moment. It wasn't always the case, but at the moment, what else is important? It should have a vibrant cultural environment. It should be tolerant and welcoming of newcomers, lots of diversity. That's what cities are great at. They're engines that kind of transform new ideas into something, into the future. But you can't do that if, you know, if only a small segment of the population can afford to live in them. And this is like a giant generational problem. And, you know, what we're experiencing in Canada, there's been previews of this in places

like London, which became way too expensive for most people. And so, you know, nurses and teachers and sanitation workers and civil servants, they had to travel huge distances. And then now a lot of people have had this taste of working remotely. And they say, yeah, why do I want to spend like two hours a day and not in a pleasant way traveling when I could be doing something else? So the housing piece is really determinative. You know, Montreal is very good about finding the balance between, you know, livability and between sort of public realm and, you know, creating new housing. Now, admittedly, you know, land prices weren't as subject to speculation

as they are in Toronto and in Vancouver. But I think the local government in Montreal used the opportunity to kind of find a balance. And not all cities have done that. And now a lot of places are in catch-up mode. But, you know, I have to emphasize that the spike in house prices is like a phenomenon in so many places. Is there maybe one other thing that you look at aside from housing affordability and

availability? I mean, for me, what makes a successful city is that it's a welcoming and open environment, right? So, you know, my parents came here from Hungary as refugees in 1956. And Toronto was, at that time, had, you know, some immigration, but not a lot of immigration. It was pretty Anglo-Saxon, pretty white. And, you know, over this long period and through, you know, the years in the 70s when immigration levels really started to go up, the city has become like this incredibly vibrant place

where people from all sorts of walks of life can connect in interesting ways. Like it's this massive recombinant culture, which I love. I, you know, the happiest place in Toronto is the international arrivals game at Pearson, right? I love going there. I always go pick up people from the airport. I love watching people come through there because they're like from everywhere, absolutely everywhere. They're reconnecting with people, the family from here. Like it's a really good leading indicator of what's healthy in a city. And cities are both physical and social environments.

And you need to have a healthy social environment and then the physical can sort of sort itself out. I love that idea of the arrival lounge. It's kind of a snapshot of the city, as you say. A couple more things that are important about what cities are facing right now. When you look around this past summer, you know, there's been a stark illustration of the effects of climate change on the urban environment.

You know, there's been wildfires, extreme weather events, floods, water shortages, lethal heat waves. Simply, are our cities equipped to deal with climate change? I kind of turned the question around and I think that cities have to drive the solutions to climate change. Because first of all, in a country like Canada, 60% of the population lives in six or seven major urban areas. So cities have to find those solutions, right? They have to decarbonize. You know, the good news is that because there's this critical mass of people,

you get the potential for economies of scale. So Paris is a good example, where the local government in Paris said, we are going to really reduce carbon consumption through private automobiles. And so that's kind of a lighthouse. It's sending out signals to other cities that it's possible and it's important to do. There's a great example of this, which is that you can recycle waste heat from sewers, right? So when you flush the toilet, it's warm. And so you can use heat exchangers grab the heat in

sewers concentrate it and use it to heat buildings and actually the city of toronto is doing this the city of vancouver has had a big project like this on for a number of years it's not that straightforward like it takes some work to to do it but it's this huge, untapped, circular economy solution to climate change problem. And it's entirely urban, right? Because it's only in big cities do you have that much sewage that you could produce heat from it. But still, I mean, I think many people would agree with you. Cities are a big generator of carbon emissions, and mayors have been at the forefront of people fighting climate change. But they're still having to deal with these disruptive events while they become the leaders, you know, in fighting climate change. How resilient are cities to these events?

And do you think we have the capability in cities to deal with like wave after wave after wave of these disruptive weather and climate events? I mean, this is a good question because it really gets at some fundamental issues about how cities grow and evolve. So New York City is like, you know, a meter or so above sea level. So it's exceptionally exposed to climate related storms and sea level rise and that kind of thing. And, you know, how do you how do you take a city like New York and, you know, make sure that it's climate-proof, like that it can survive the sea level rise, you know, that's coming over the next century. And, you know, there are lots of ideas about this, about, you know, cities that are actually moving away from exposed areas to

flooding, for example, and, you know, different approaches to, you know, firefighting. But on the other hand, you have these places like in the south where you have this, you know, vicious cycle of this extreme dependence on air conditioning because of this extreme heat events. And it's not clear how you break that cycle. You know, maybe, you know, if we come back in 100 years, people will have just abandoned those areas because they just become unlivable. When we've watched some of these cities deal with these recent events, for example, in Hawaii, you know, the city of Lahaina and Yellowknife that's recently been completely evacuated. And then there have been incredible challenges in trying to get people out in time or, you know, out of the way of danger. there have been incredible challenges in trying to get people out in time or out of the way of danger. Is there a role for smart technology in improving cities' abilities to evacuate their residents when need be? Because some of the problems that people have faced in these cities is

getting warnings too late or not hearing about the conditions that they're living in. So we're trying to imagine what it'd be like if you had to evacuate a city like Calgary or Montreal or Ottawa, you know. This is the argument that I'm trying to make in the book, is that smart city technology is a tool, but it's only one tool. And, you know, there are lots of things that go into making up healthy cities. Some of them are technological and some of them are definitely not. You know, if you fall into helping each other and, you know, kind of doing what human beings do, unmediated by technology and unmanaged by technology,

just helping their neighbors. And that's an acknowledgement of the fact that cities are fundamentally human social spaces that include technology, but are not just about technology. include technology, but are not just about technology. So why do you think that cities so often seem to be caught off guard by things like big demographic, social, or technological shifts? For example, not having enough charging stations for electrical vehicles or not knowing how to regulate disruptive corporations like Uber and Airbnb without stifling innovation? Because there's so many people doing their own thing

that it's very difficult to manage a big city. It sometimes does require a massive external event to kind of get everyone focused on one thing. I write a lot about climate and clean tech and so on. And I'm hoping that the events of the past year, particularly the past summer, are opening people's eyes to the problems that we face, that it's not a thing off in the distance somewhere. It's happening right now. So then, given all that it takes to run a city like this, what does a viable future for the post-pandemic city look like to you? Well, I think a the post-pandemic city look like to you? Well, I think a viable post-pandemic city, first of all, is one that wraps its arms around the importance of climate change. It doesn't just pay lip service to it.

There are two huge problems in our world at the moment, housing and climate change. And they actually can, there's a way of dealing with them in a mutually reinforcing way. But a city has to be conscious of the fact that this is the future. There's no question about it. And it also has to be conscious of the fact that we need to find ways of accommodating the people who live in cities in humane ways, right? That it's 2023, right? The idea that, you know, that 12 people would be packed into a two bedroom condo, it's not on, you know,

in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we have to just do better than that. So those are the two most important objectives, I would say. And to get there, you know, municipal governments

have to be a little bit more flexible. They have to kind of revisit the ways that they've been doing things for a long time that haven't really been challenged and do some unplanning. Unplanning is hard. We plan too much and now we have to plan less in order to allow more housing to be built. I'm not arguing for a laissez-faire model of municipal government, but just an approach that says, okay, enough, we surely must be able to sort of build buildings in, you know, a couple of years instead of eight years. And we should be able to build transit

networks in seven years instead of 15 years. And because we know that this happens in other parts of the world, so we should be able to do that too. John Lawrence, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thanks very much for your interest. John Lawrence is the author of Dream States, Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias, which won the 2022 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. This episode was produced by Chris Wadzkow. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.