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.

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