New Book Released Today: A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences

The city is a computer, the streetscape is the interface, you are the cursor, and your smartphone is the input device. This is the user-based, bottom-up version of the city-as-computer idea, but there's also a top-down vision that is systems-based ...it could be more efficient if they were "smart" ============================The idea of the city as an information-processing machine has in recent years manifested as a cultural obsession with urban sites of data storage and transmission. Scholars, artists, and designers write books, conduct walking tours, and make maps of internet infrastructures. We take pleasure in pointing at nondescript buildings that hold thousands of whirring servers, at surveillance cameras, camouflaged antennae, and hovering drones. . .Urban intelligence involves experience, observation, sensory engagement.

We need new models for thinking about cities that do not compute.

A BOLD REASSESSMENT OF 'SMART CITIES' THAT REVEALS WHAT IS LOST WHEN WE CONCEIVE OF OUR URBAN SPACES AS COMPUTERS 

Shannon Mattern   

=========================================================================================

"Smart City" Agenda For Mesa City Council Meeting Tomorrow Thu 28 March 2019

Looks like it was published late in the day yesterday, but at least it's available to the public ahead of time. . . and the same day the public also gets the agenda for the April Fools Day City Council Meeting on April 1st. Ready, willing and able to hear a presentation, discuss, and provide direction on the City’s SmartCity Master Plan and the use of technologiesand data-driven insights to improve the quality of life, civic engagement, economic development, service delivery, and community vibrancy?????
__________________________________________________________ 

QUESTION: When if ever before was 
Mesa A Smart City?
TIME TO RE-BRAND THAT! Hire a consultant 
In 2018, the City of Mesa engaged ThinkBig Partners, LLC to assist in the development of a Smart City Master Plan. Most importantly, this effort included engaging our citizens, businesses and the public as we identified the key strategies & priorities for building a smarter Mesa!

https://www.mesaaz.gov/about-us/smart-city-draft-2 .....

---

Mesa installing downtown kiosks as key part of dynamic citizen engagement platform

April 1, 2021 at 3:09 pm    

As part of the City of Mesa's Smart City strategic plan, the City has partnered with Smart City Media to install ten dual screen smart digital kiosks throughout downtown Mesa and along the light rail corridor east to Gilbert Road. The digital kiosks will each offer two 55-inch touch screen displays with "way finding" functionality for people to locate specific businesses or receive Mesa focused content such as event promotions and safety alerts. . .

==========================================================================

Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city.

A City Is Not a Computer reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models.
Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities.

> She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the “city-as-computer” metaphor, which undergirds much of today’s urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing.

> Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city’s many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs.

Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design.

____________________________________________________________________________

Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy

[Book] A City Is Not a Computer

 

experientia.com |