Table Of ContentA City Is Not a Computer
A City Is Not a Computer:
Other Urban Intelligences
Shannon Mattern
Published by Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
in association with Places Journal
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Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
Cities, Trees & Algorithms 1
1. City Console 18
2. A City Is Not a Computer 51
3. Public Knowledge 73
4. Maintenance Codes 106
Conclusion
Platforms, Grafts & Arboreal Intelligence 140
Notes 155
Index 184
Photo Credits 187
Acknowledgments
A wide network of people, places, and things contributed to
the making of this book. My first and deepest debt is to Nancy
Levinson and Josh Wallaert, my editors at Places Journal, where
much of this work first appeared. The chapters that follow
draw from a number of articles that appeared in Places over
the past eight years: “Methodolatry and the Art of Measure”
(2013), “Interfacing Urban Intelligence” (2014), “Library as
Infrastructure” (2014), “History of the Urban Dashboard” (2015),
“Instrumental City” (2016), “Public In/Formation” (2016),
“A City Is Not a Computer” (2017), “Databodies in Codespace”
(2018), “Maintenance and Care” (2018), “Fugitive Libraries”
(2019), and “Post-It Note City” (2020). Nancy and Josh gave me
a platform, sharpened my thinking, and helped me tune my voice
as I came into my own as a scholar and a public writer. Josh, in
particular, became a collaborative thinker and a great friend with
whom I shared quite a few running jokes through Word’s “track
changes.” He understood (and perhaps even shared) my fasci-
nation with the ways the world embodies knowledge. He knew
my quirks, allowed me to make mistakes without making me feel
stupid, and made me better. I am eternally grateful.
I am also profoundly thankful for the staff at Princeton
University Press: my editor Michelle Komie, editorial assistant
Kenneth Guay, permissions manager Lisa Black, production editor
Mark Bellis, and copyeditor Cathy Slovensky saw promise in this
project—even when I at times wondered about the value of engag-
ing with the frustratingly capricious world of urban technology
through the resolutely enduring form of an academic book—and
expertly shepherded it through the process of materialization.
Several folks invited me to share early versions of this work.
The ever-generous (and breathtakingly prolific) Rob Kitchin first
proposed that I explore the history of dashboards, which I did
with the assistance of my spectacular research assistant Steve
Taylor, who tackled the literature on aviation history on my behalf.
Rob, along with Sung-Yueh Perng, invited me to share portions
of “History of the Urban Dashboard” at Maynooth University and
in Understanding Spatial Media, a volume Rob coedited with the
equally fantastic Tracey Lauriault and Matt Wilson, both brilliant,
gracious, and hilarious colleagues. My friend Zed Adams and the
students in our “Thinking Through Interfaces” class then helped
me deepen my thinking about, and through, dashboards.
Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson solicited a chapter
about the city as an information-processing machine, so I decided
to argue the opposite. “A City Is Not a Computer” elicited a num-
ber of exciting invitations, including one from Lev Bratishenko,
who welcomed me to the Canadian Centre for Architecture to
share this work. I thank the teams at Instituto Intersaber, dérive:
Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung, and Courrier International for
translating this piece into Portuguese, German, and French.
I’ve been thinking about libraries for a few decades, and I’m
tremendously grateful to all the librarians and archivists who
have, over the years, answered my research questions, retrieved
my materials, offered fruitful leads, invited me to share my
research, welcomed me into their design teams, and become
friends. I wrote “Library as Infrastructure” in 2014 and was
grateful to see that it resonated widely across the library world,
which is in part what prompted Nate Hill to invite me to join the
board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council in 2015,
and to become its president in 2018. Through METRO I’ve drawn
inspiration from the talented, tenacious, creative leaders of sev-
eral of New York City’s esteemed library systems, and I’ve learned
a great deal from Nate Hill, Josh Greenberg, Nick Higgins, Nick
Buron, Caryl Soriano, Stephen Bury, Leah Meisterlin, Kameelah
Janan Rasheed, and particularly Greta Byrum, who has become
an intellectual collaborator and a good friend.
viii A City Is Not a Computer
I’m grateful to Rosalie Genevro, Cassim Shepherd, and Anne
Rieselbach of the Architectural League of New York and to David
Giles, then research director of the Center for an Urban Future
and now chief strategy officer at the Brooklyn Public Library,
who invited me to join the coordinating unit for the 2014–15
“Re-Envisioning Branch Libraries” design study—and to all the
extraordinarily talented teams who showed us how we can honor
and enhance this marvelous institution through thoughtful
design. My early library-themed partnerships with the League
established the foundation for several additional, generative
collaborations. The teams at C2O Library & Collabtive, Arquine,
and the Third Program at Serbian Public Radio (via Jovana
Timotijević and Dubravka Sekulić) then allowed “Library as
Infrastructure” to reach a broader audience by translating it into
Bahasa Indonesian, Spanish, and Serbo-Croatian.
Throughout my academic career, I’ve sought to draw
attention to “invisible” infrastructural labor and knowledge
work. In my 2018 Places article about hardware stores,
“Community Plumbing,” I acknowledged in a footnote the
proliferating literature on maintenance, which prompted my
editors to invite me to expand this footnote into a full article.
Matt Zook and Matt Wilson invited me to share an early version
of “Maintenance and Care” in the Department of Geography at
the University of Kentucky, and Ira Wagman and Liam Young
then welcomed a reprise in the School of Journalism and
Communication at Carleton University. I’m grateful to their
colleagues and students, particularly to John Shiga, for their
constructive feedback.
I must also acknowledge many friends and colleagues at the
New School and around the world with whom I’ve shared many
sparkling conversations and good laughs, and enjoyed fruitful
collaborations. There are too many of you to name individually,
but I must recognize Julia Foulkes, Aleksandra Wanger, and
Sharrona Pearl, who, over the years, have offered invaluable
feedback on drafts that ultimately found their way into A City Is
Not a Computer.
Acknowledgments ix
