Jane Jacobs’ Smart-Home Enthymemes: Ambiguous Urban Appeals in Google’s Toronto Smart City

Abstract

This article examines how appeals to the urbanist legacy of Jane Jacobs were deployed by both supporters and opponents of a proposed smart city development in Toronto. The analysis indicates how these contrasting allusions to Jacobs’ urban ideals were facilitated by a longstanding ideological fluidity in Jacobs’ writings and an enthymematic exploitation of ambiguities around the interpretation of her ideas. I argue that the enthymematic status of Jacobsian concepts provides a productive ambiguity and strategic rhetorical resource for problematizing hegemonic planning agendas that are presented as post-political.

Keywords:

• Jane Jacobs
• Planning Discourse
• Post-Political Rhetoric
• Smart Cities
• Urban Communication

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dr. Paul Elliott Johnson and three anonymous reviewers for their critical comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Curry Chandler

Curry Chandler is a Gerda Henkel Foundation research grantee and Lecturer in Communication at the University of Pittsburgh.