John Lorinc is a Toronto freelance journalist and editor. He writes about cities, politics, business, climate change, and local history for various media, including Spacing magazine, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, The Walrus, Corporate Knights, and, previously, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Readers’ Digest. John has won numerous National Magazine Awards for his journalism and was the 2019–20 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, which produced a series of ten articles on smart cities that were the basis of Dream States. He is the author of three previous books, including The New City (Penguin, 2006), and has co-edited several Coach House uTOpia anthologies, including The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood (2015) and Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer (2017).

"The promise of the so-called smart city has been at the forefront of urban planning and development since the early 2010s, and the tech industry that supplies smart city software and hardware is now worth hundreds of billions a year. But the ideas and approaches underpinning smart city tech raise tough and important questions about the future of urban communities, surveillance, automation, and public participation. The smart city era, moreover, belongs firmly in a longer historical narrative about cities -- one defined by utopian ideologies, architectural visions, and technological fantasies. Smart streetlights, water and air quality tracking, autonomous vehicles: with examples from all over the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, and Chicago, Dream States unpacks the world of smart city tech, but also situates this important shift in city-building into a broader story about why we still dream about perfect places."--