Dream States, by John Lorinc

I expected more from the senior editor of Spacing. Aside from the obligatory comments on Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project and the COVID-19 pandemic, there is almost nothing in this book I haven’t read before, or that hasn’t been covered better elsewhere. It’s 2022—do I really need to read yet another chapter about ShotSpotter like it’s news? Lorinc writes about many of these projects and issues like a newspaper reporter, which is to say we learn a lot about other people’s opinions of them, but precious little about his own. He also cites the work of many “smart city” academics from the late 2010s, and even they are frequently just rehashing material covered better in Adam Greenfield’s 2013 Against the Smart City. What the “smart city” conversation needed from John Lorinc was precise thinking and strong opinions, and what it got instead was a literature review.