Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media

by Shannon Mattern

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Cities, Urbanism, Technology, Urban, Sociology, Geography

288 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2017

Reviews

[Aya Nassar]

Easy flowing as if it is not an academic text. takes a more global outlook than you's think. I gasped as I saw it responding to my anticipated thought, and make a tricky theoretical point that I am trying to make, attuning to materiality without losing sight of human narrative.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A welcome elaboration on (and expansion of) her argument in _Deep Mapping the Media City_. The text itself is pleasantly written and its many examples/case studies admirably diverse.

[Derek Kompare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding deep but accessible dive into media history, coming at it through urban design, infrastructure, and consideration of the materiality of media. One of the best books in media studies of the decade, refreshingly putting film, TV, and the internet to the side in favor of aurality and vision more broadly.

[Rowan Compton · Rating 5 out of 5]

good read, interesting