Rendering of a timber canopy atop a smart city cover

Smartness already defines our cities, just not in the way Sidewalk Labs and others would have you think

In May 2020, facing mounting criticism from privacy advocates, Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel Doctoroff announced that the Google-backed company was scrapping its smart city project in the Quayside neighborhood of Toronto. With its passing, there was a sense among critics that some sort of evil had been defeated—that the little guy had won and Alphabet/Google had been

A screenshot of flight simulator 2020 showing a plane over the mountains of brazil

Flight Simulator 2020 provides a worldwide playset for architects and urbanists

Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2020 is a technological masterpiece. Reviews are nearly uniformly glowing, adopting tones both confessional (“the most incredible experience I’ve ever had on a computer”) and epochal (a “once-in-a-generation wow moment”). The game’s devotion to realism begins in the mechanical and aesthetic accuracy of the aircraft you pilot but is also extended, in