A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences

by Shannon Mattern

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Urbanism, Cities, Design, Urban Planning, Sociology, Philosophy

187 pages, Paperback

Published August 10, 2021

Reviews

[Lindsey Keefer · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A more specific conception of the city-as-organism is that of the city-as-biophysical-body, with its own circulatory, respiratory, and nervous systems and waste streams" (60)

"[T]he city became capable of transmitting a complex culture from generation to generation, for it marshaled together not only the physical means but the human agents needed to pass on and enlarge this heritage" (63)

"Neurosceintist Karl Lashley acknowledged this tendency–to draw cognitive metaphors from prevailing technology–as early as 1951: 'Descartes ... developed a hydraulic theory of the action of the brain. We have since had telephone theories, electrical theories, and now, theories based on the computing machines and automatic rudders...'" (70)

Fascinating! I wish it were a little longer; Mattern explores how "a city is not a computer" extensively, but I found myself wanting more from the "other urban intelligences" part of the title.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very nice metaphors for explaining the (ethical) problems with the use of digital technologies in cities. Mattern points out why we need human knowledge and libraries as places where people can meet and engage in bottom-up community projects.

[Carlosfelipe Pardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a quick and good read and is a very useful review of different views on how city metaphors don’t really work, but that technology *may* be used well in improving cities.

[Adriana · Rating 3 out of 5]

It seems like Mattern is trying to pull digital metaphors out of systems that are inherently/fundamentally physical and vice versa. I liked all of the fresh perspectives (e.g. role of libraries in cities) though. There are 30 times Mattern used the word "epistemological". That very word could describe how the book is written: a very broad scope of knowledge that ends up boiling down to something a little left of the title. I think reading it is a nice launch pad for future thought, but I don't think it's *the* urban tech book.

[Audrey Kalman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not not dense, but very informative. And covers a lot of ground for ~150 pages!

"A City Is Not a Computer" does feel like a made-up book I would be reading in a fictionalized version of my life...anywho here are some chunks I liked:

something about early dashboard design: “It served both to market the car and to cultivate the identity and agency of the driver: this assemblage of displays required a new literacy in the language and aesthetics of the interface, which constituted its own form of symbolic, if not mechanical, mastery.” (32)

“The lesson here is that we can't know our cities merely through a screen. From time to time, we also need to fly by sight, fiddle with exploding radiators, and tramp around in the mud.” (48)

“Of course, not all archives are ideologically equal. Community archives validate the personal histories and intellectual contributions of diverse publics, particularly those whose lives have traditionally been omitted from the historical record, as we'll discuss later. Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies and customs and immigration offices are networked with geographically distributed National Security Agency and other federal repos-itories, which tend to overrepresent those same marginalized subjects. These archives are not of the same species, nor do they "process" "data" in the same fashion.” (66)

“We must also recognize the shortcomings in models that presume the objectivity of urban data and conveniently delegate critical, often ethical decisions to the machine. We humans make urban information by various means: through sensory experience, through long-term exposure to a place, and, yes, by systematically filtering data. It's essential to make space in our cities for those diverse methods of knowledge production and stewardship. And we have to grapple with the political and ethical implications of our methods and models, embedded in all acts of planning and design. City making is always, simultane-ously, an enactment of city knowing-which cannot be reduced to computation.” (72)

“And while take-out menus might seem to be an invasive print species, always sneaking into our mailboxes and under our doors, the NYPL collects historical menus that offer windows onto local culinary, cultural, business, and design history, and that can also serve as proxies for tracing immigration history and the movement of ethnic enclaves around the city.” (85)

“In many academic disciplines and professional practices-architecture, urban studies, labor history, development economics, and the information sciences, just to name a few-maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause. This is an exciting area of inquiry largely because the lines between scholarship and practice are blurred. To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. To fill in the gaps in this literature, to draw connections among different disciplines, is an act of repair or, simply, of taking care-connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices.” (107)

“We'll close this section with an example that illustrates the integration of personal and structural care-and the (often clandestine) ways that service spaces are designed into archi-tecture." In the 1990s, newspaper publisher Jean-Frangois Lemoine, bound to a wheelchair, decided to build a material world for himself that didn't emphasize his disability. "I want a complex house," he reportedly told architect Rem Koolhaas, "because the house will define my world." Koolhaas designed a three-level structure organized around a writing desk on a 10 x 11.5-foot elevator platform, which blends into the house's floors as it moves up and down, allowing Lemoine to bring the rest of the house to him. As Koolhaas explained to architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, the building "reassert[s] the position of the French male within the family."62 Ouroussoff observes that the "children's rooms are pointedly difficult to reach" from this moving platform, which suggests the distance between this French male and his child-care duties.” (124)

“A city built to recognize the wisdom ingrained in its trees and statuary, its interfaces and archives, its marginalized communities and more-than-human inhabitants is ultimately much, much smarter than any supercomputer.” (154)

[Ashwin Prasad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never considered comparing a city to a computer, but it is a remarkable parallel. This book does a great job of diving deeper into many parts of a city. It also paints a strong case for how we should not take the computational outlook to design these urban hubs as we do with computers.

Below are two of my favorite pictures from the book (coincidentally on consecutive pages in the book!):



Motorola 68030 CPU

This picture shows the intricacies of a computer processor. Shown above are hundreds of thousands of transistors, which allow the flow of electricity to be processed through its logic gates. Looking at a CPU from this view makes me wonder how fair the parallels between urban planning and computer design can be.



Oswald Mathias Ungers, City Metaphors, 1976

This image parallels human beings, urban structures, and electric systems. While these systems may look similar to someone not wearing their glasses, they all serve different complex functions.

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Regardless of personal opinion on the topic, I recommend giving this book a read. While reading it, my mind tried to think of arguments for why we should approach certain areas of urban planning in a more math-centric way (i.e., Breaking down the requirements of a district into nodes, creating a mathematical structure that connects the nodes and allowing an algorithm to generate a hypothetical final state of the district), which made it a mentally engaging piece of literature. It also made me think about the many different types of human beings that cities provide a home and community for. Since we are not computers, it isn't easy to approach urban planning when the safety and well-being of a broad set of human beings are being considered.

[Lex Dance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly good discussion of city-making in the modern day. I particularly enjoyed the comment on how physical buttons make the user of a dashboard feel as though they are in control of the data; I related this immediately to Star Wars and the empire's infinite buttons (I was watching Andor as I read this). This book encouraged me to consider majoring in urban design. It was a bit hard for me to read at times (pretty dense) but worth it.

[Jackson]

I get that this book draws heavily on the non-representational/assemblage approaches to urbanism, but the text gets quite lost in speculating over different metaphorical structures before landing on a claim that is quite expected (and a bit left of the title). Most useful for politicians, less useful for people who have already done some thinking about the issues at hand

[Derek Ouyang · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sure, a city is not a computer. And this book, so littered with its own mixed metaphors as to be mis-ontological, is not a good use of your time.

[Bridget]

Speed-read this bad boy for school. Was probably good, but nothing really feels good when you read it in under 48 hours. She says "epistemologies" a lot.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-researched and broad book with good metaphors. An good look at digital cities.