Mihailo Mick Malowany

In recent years, the urban planning profession has contended with ambitious and disruptive agendas of urban innovation, variously labelled ‘intelligent’, ‘smart’, and‘smarter cities’, thatare increasingly entangled with urban sustainability agendas. This research investigateshow urban planning practice is engaging and co-evolving with the smarter city agenda. It centres ona retrospective case study of Sidewalk Toronto, a recently cancelled smart revitalization project on Toronto’s eastern waterfront.Following an introduction to the history of the project, areview of urban studies literaturebuilds the academic context for the research.  A theoretical approach is then developed based on concepts from urban commons and critical institutionalism, whichmake senseof thehighlypoliticized and geographicallyembedded context of smarter city projects by embracing nuance, complexity and uncertainty.The Critical Institutional Analysis and Development (CIAD)Framework isproposed as the primary research tool for structuring inquiry and analysis.The case study methodology revolves around semi-structured interviews with twelve plannerswho engaged with Sidewalk Toronto in a variety of roles and organisationalcontexts. An inductive and iterative codingprocedurewas appliedto the primary evidenceto develop four qualitative themes:

1. Finding a path to ‘yes’
2. Mediating tense public-private relationships
3. Engaging in new multidisciplinary discourses
4. Discovering newaspects of urban resilience.

The CIAD Framework is used as a heuristic device to define and illustrate these themesin a series of infographics. Theyform the basis for a subsequentin-depth discussion, which takes a critical view of the heavily channelized and distanced engagement between Sidewalk Labs and the City of Torontoand thesystemic inertiathat exists between the City and the development industry. The discussionprovides twokeypieces of insightinto howplanners might addressthese obstructivedynamics:

1. Planners should focus on public-private partnershipto drive systemic change.
2. Planners in the public sector should strive to be flexibleand proactivein engaging with the private sectorin order to facilitate impactful partnership.

The dissertation concludes with a reflection on thelimitations of thetheoretical approach and the case study methodology and with a discussion of the research outlook, whichidentifies opportunities to develop further insight from this case study as well asavenues for future research.