The Quayside Project: Some Reassembly Required

In this book, I have developed an approach the Quayside project that attends to journalism discourse and the smart city. In this chapter, I review and further contextualize the Quayside project story to explain why this smart city assemblage did not work out. Through retrospective assimilation, we can better understand how mediatized controversy unsettled the public image of a smart city project. In the narrative progression, a smart city frame was counterposed with two other frames that associated the project with three major problems: privacy, governance, and intellectual property. An oppositional dimension with persuasive force led to major modifications of the project. Outside of Sidewalk Toronto, government organizations had slower time scales for policy making. I conclude that mediatized controversy conditioned this particular smart city project’s alteration and dissolution. In closing, I return to journalism as curriculum to assess dialogical urban learning.