Smartypants cities

Ideas to discuss

• How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables
• Smart city versus surveillance state.
• Development externalities.
• “urbanist”
• weaponised design
• politics of play
• NIMBY
• artificial reefs

To read

• Shannon Mattern, A City Is Not a Computer:

  “What should a city optimize for?” Even in the age of peak Silicon Valley, that’s a hard question to take seriously. (Hecklers on Twitter had a few ideas, like “fish tacos” and “pez dispensers.”)

• Michael Batty’s vision at first glance is kind of capital-friendly techno-utopianism, which rings weird in my ears. I’m sure billion dollar oligopolist public-private-partnerships developments don’t need any extra cheerleading as they already have departments who are perfectly capable. But that is a perhaps necessary marketing strategy for urbanists in 21st century London, And some of the excesses of corporate smartcityland are refuted if you read past the abstract (vacuous urban dashboards etc) He has some interesting mathematical models:

  • Batty’s review editorials in Environment and Planning B.

  • Arizona State Smart Cities Course

• Adam Greenfield is the guy who calls out technocapitalist utopians and will hence not get you funded.

  • a piece for the Guardian’s “Resilient Cities” project.

  • Also this review of his Against the smart city.

  • Against the smart city itself, why not?

• walkability versus cars

References