Technology mediates how we know and experience cities, and the nature of
this mediation has always been deeply political. Today, the production
and deployment of data is at the forefront of projects to grasp and
reshape urban life. Ways of Knowing Cities considers the role of
technology in generating, materializing, and contesting urban
epistemologies--tracing an arc from ubiquitous sites of "smart"
urbanism, to discrete struggles over infrastructural governance, to
forgotten histories of segregation now naturalized in urban algorithms,
to exceptional territories of border policing. Bringing together
architects, urbanists, artists, and scholars of critical migration
studies, media theory, geography, anthropology, and literature, the
essays stage a deeply interdisciplinary conversation, interrogating the
ways in which certain ways of knowing are predicated on the erasure of
others. In this opening, the book engages the information systems that
structure urban space and social life in it, historically and in the
present moment, to imagine alternative practices and generate new
critical perspectives on spatial research.
Ways of Knowing Cities includes texts by Eve Blau, Simone Browne,
Maribel Casas-Cortes, Wendy Chun, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Beth Coleman,
V. Mitch McEwen, Orit Halpern, Charles Heller, Shannon Mattern, Leah
Meisterlin, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Dietmar
Offenhuber, Lorenzo Pezzani, Anita Say Chan, and Matthew W. Wilson.
