A new wave of enthusiasm for smart cities, urban data, and the Internet
of Things has created the impression that computation can solve almost
any urban problem. Subjecting this claim to critical scrutiny, in this
book, Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin examine the cultural,
historical, and contemporary contexts in which urban computational
logics have emerged. They consider the rationalities and techniques that
constitute emerging computational forms of urbanization, including work
on digital urbanism, smart cities, and, more recently, platform
urbanism. They explore the modest potentials and serious contradictions
of reconfiguring urban life, city services, and urban-networked
infrastructure through computational operating systems--an urban OS.
Luque-Ayala and Marvin argue that in order to understand how digital
technologies transform and shape the city, it is necessary to analyze
the underlying computational logics themselves. Drawing on fieldwork
that stretches across eleven cities in American, European, and Asian
contexts, they investigate how digital products, services, and
ecosystems are reshaping the ways in which the city is imagined, known,
and governed. They discuss the reconstitution of the contemporary city
through digital technologies, practices, and techniques, including
data-driven governance, predictive analytics, digital mapping, urban
sensing, digitally enabled control rooms, civic hacking, and open data
narratives. Focusing on the relationship between the emerging operating
systems of the city and their traditional infrastructures, they shed
light on the political implications of using computer technologies to
understand and generate new urban spaces and flows.
