Pipe Dreams, and Other Such Structures: Technology, Space, and Power in Utopian Urbanism from 1888 to 2018
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2019
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Bryn Mawr College. Department of Growth and Structure of Cities
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Thesis
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
Alphabet Inc.’s Sidewalk Toronto, a ‘smart city’ project under development in the Quayside district of Toronto, is touted as a utopian panacea, promising to use ubiquitous Internet-connected sensors to redefine urban life. However, the ways in which this plan imagines controlling civic data and invisibly restructuring systems of power has provoked public outcry. This thesis positions Sidewalk Toronto within the chronology of technological utopian literature as a means to examine how historical visionaries have conceptualized models of citizenship in changing technological landscapes, and consequently to ask what contemporary visionaries can learn from these implications. In paralleling utopian spatial and societal form with changing modes of telecommunication technologies, I find that the ways in which flows of urban information are controlled have the power to create or destroy publics, and establish or erase notions of democracy. From these perspectives, this thesis aims to warn of the dangers of the ‘smart city’ typology if a more interdisciplinary mode of thought isn’t established — for as visions of the utopian city veer towards images of technocratic control, so too will our realities.