Journalism and the Smart City

With Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project, Toronto joined other cities where smart city discourse has circulated and projects have been developed, interpreted, and studied. Situated at the intersection of media, technocultural, urban, and journalism studies, this book examines the discursive struggle over the production of a future, hybrid urban space. My overall thesis is that the news media’s production of discourse was imbricated in the process of assembling a smart city project. In this chapter, I begin by calling attention to the dynamics of mediatized controversy. In the second section, I discuss why attending to journalism and the smart city is an important move in urban media studies. In the third section, I make the case that quality journalism mattered for urban learning. In the fourth section, I present a synopsis of the Quayside project story that accents how the project’s trajectory to assemble a novel neighbourhood assemblage had significance for technological policy and politics. In the final section, I set out the work to be done in the rest of the book to show how local journalism was an influential mediator of this project for the city of Toronto.