Data and the City

Author: Rob Kitchin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315407361
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
There is a long history of governments, businesses, science and citizens producing and utilizing data in order to monitor, regulate, profit from and make sense of the urban world. Recently, we have entered the age of big data, and now many aspects of everyday urban life are being captured as data and city management is mediated through data-driven technologies. Data and the City is the first edited collection to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of how this new era of urban big data is reshaping how we come to know and govern cities, and the implications of such a transformation. This book looks at the creation of real-time cities and data-driven urbanism and considers the relationships at play. By taking a philosophical, political, practical and technical approach to urban data, the authors analyse the ways in which data is produced and framed within socio-technical systems. They then examine the constellation of existing and emerging urban data technologies. The volume concludes by considering the social and political ramifications of data-driven urbanism, questioning whom it serves and for what ends. This book, the companion volume to 2016’s Code and the City, offers the first critical reflection on the relationship between data, data practices and the city, and how we come to know and understand cities through data. It will be crucial reading for those who wish to understand and conceptualize urban big data, data-driven urbanism and the development of smart cities.

A City Is Not a Computer

Author: Shannon Mattern
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122675X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
A bold reassessment of "smart cities" that reveals what is lost when we conceive of our urban spaces as computers 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.

County and City Data Book

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 1112

Book Description

The Responsive City

Author: Stephen Goldsmith
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118910907
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
Leveraging Big Data and 21st century technology to renew cities and citizenship in America The Responsive City is a guide to civic engagement and governance in the digital age that will help leaders link important breakthroughs in technology and data analytics with age-old lessons of small-group community input to create more agile, competitive, and economically resilient cities. Featuring vivid case studies highlighting the work of pioneers in New York, Boston, Chicago and more, the book provides a compelling model for the future of governance. The book will help mayors, chief technology officers, city administrators, agency directors, civic groups and nonprofit leaders break out of current paradigms to collectively address civic problems. The Responsive City is the culmination of research originating from the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative, an ongoing project at Harvard Kennedy School working to catalyze adoption of data projects on the city level. The book is co-authored by Professor Stephen Goldsmith, director of Data-Smart City Solutions at Harvard Kennedy School, and Professor Susan Crawford, co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg penned the book’s foreword. Based on the authors’ experiences and extensive research, The Responsive City explores topics including: Building trust in the public sector and fostering a sustained, collective voice among communities; Using data-smart governance to preempt and predict problems while improving quality of life; Creating efficiencies and saving taxpayer money with digital tools; and Spearheading these new approaches to government with innovative leadership.

Big Data, Code and the Discrete City

Author: Silvio Carta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351007386
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
Big Data, Code and the Discrete City explores how digital technologies are gradually changing the way in which the public space is designed by architects, managed by policymakers and experienced by individuals. Smart city technologies are superseding the traditional human experience that has characterised the making of the public space until today. This book examines how computers see the public space and the effect of algorithms, artificial intelligences and automated processes on the human experience in public spaces. Divided into three parts, the first part of this book examines the notion of discreteness in its origins and applications to computer sciences. The second section presents a dual perspective: it explores the ways in which public spaces are constructed by the computer-driven logic and then translated into control mechanisms, design strategies and software-aided design. This perspective also describes the way in which individuals perceive this new public space, through its digital logic, and discrete mechanisms (from Wi-Fi coverage to self-tracking). Finally, in the third part, this book scrutinises the discrete logic with which computers operate, and how this is permeating into aspects of city life. This book is valuable for anyone interested in urban studies and digital technologies, and more specifically in big data, urban informatics and public space.

Decoding the City

Author: Dietmar Offenhuber
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3038213926
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
The MIT based SENSEable City Lab under Carlo Ratti is one of the research centers that deal with the flow of people and goods, but also of refuse that moves around the world. Experience with large-scale infrastructure projects suggest that more complex and above all flexible answers must be sought to questions of transportation or disposal. This edition, edited by Dietmar Offenhuber and Carlo Ratti, shows how Big Data change reality and, hence, the way we deal with the city. It discusses the impact of real-time data on architecture and urban planning, using examples developed in the SENSEable City Lab. They demonstrate how the Lab interprets digital data as material that can be used for the formulation of a different urban future. It also looks at the negative aspects of the city-related data acquisition and control. The authors address issues with which urban planning disciplines will work intensively in the future: questions that not only radically and critically review, but also change fundamentally, the existing tasks and how the professions view their own roles.

Code and Clay, Data and Dirt

Author: Shannon Mattern
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452955425
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
For years, pundits have trumpeted the earthshattering changes that big data and smart networks will soon bring to our cities. But what if cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for thousands of years. Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and civic knowledge—and through technologies including the telephone, telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice—cities have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore. Mattern’s vivid prose takes readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media archaeology to the city’s streets, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

Author: Anthony M. Townsend
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039324153X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our smart, mobile, connected future. From Beijing to Boston, cities are deploying smart technology—sensors embedded in streets and subways, Wi-Fi broadcast airports and green spaces—to address the basic challenges faced by massive, interconnected metropolitan centers. In Smart Cities, Anthony M. Townsend documents this emerging futuristic landscape while considering the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings of the key actors—entrepreneurs, mayors, philanthropists, and software developers—at work in shaping the new urban frontier.

The Smart Enough City

Author: Ben Green
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262352257
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity. Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself. In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.

The Image of the City

Author: Kevin Lynch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262620017
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.