DISCUSSANT REPORT #1
“A CITY IS NOT A COMPUTER” BY SHANNON MATTERN
BY ARIA SANYA
Declaration of Integrity
I, Aria Sanya affirm that my writing is original and that I did not use artificial intelligence of any kind, plagiarism, nor the help of ghostwriters to generate any sort of content for this report. I understand that the consequences of doing so are severe and also embarrassing.
In “A City Is Not a Computer”, Shannon Mattern warns about an impending interest by technology companies in city-making. She describes how companies like Y-Combinator and Alphabet have become fascinated with building cities “from the internet up” and engineering them to “maximize human potential”. Much of Mattern’s skepticism stems from these companies’ ignorance of organic, non-semantic, cultural human experiences that build cities. It seems obvious that these companies are looking to design cities in the same vein as they would design businesses—that is, focusing on scale, efficiency, and eventually, profit. In essence, Mattern worries about the effects of disregarding the “human” aspect of cities.
Mattern foremost warns against heavily technological infrastructure within the city; “Sidewalk Labs has already installed public WiFi kiosks…that may someday exchange data with autonomous vehicles.” Where is the line between a “smart city” and a surveilling one? At what point do “autonomous vehicles…pervasive cameras and sensors” lend themselves to be tools of oppression rather than order? These are the sorts of questions she posits.
Mattern also asserts that technology that can gather data within an urban area can be easily misused by the government and threaten the privacy of residents. This is especially poignant within the context of the United States, where the changing political climate has caused many to worry about infringements on their personal rights.
Mattern writes, “the city as a computer appeals because it frames the messiness of urban life as programmable and subject to rational order.” She cites anthropologist Hannah Knox who continues that in this context, technical solutions seem to promise political emancipation.
The city has historically been used as an “apparatus for record-keeping and informational management”. This shows up through city archives, libraries, and museums. Archives are important to track finances, politics, and history, enriching culture. Mattern cites Lewis Mumford, saying that record-making feels inherent to cities as “fundamentally communicative space[s]”. However, she argues that the record-keeping that cities have historically done differs from the record-keeping technology seeks to do in legitimacy, benefits, and impacts on personal liberty. Libraries empower people to interact with information, further enriching the city’s intellectual devotion and the ability of people to think critically about that information. On the other hand, technology is good at processing data algorithmically, but it lacks the nuance of empathy, abstract reason, and emotion. A computer organizing data treats people identically, whereas a human organizing data understands the cultural nuances among different neighborhoods and groups of people across time within the context of human experience and historical understanding.
In “How to Study Cities”, Richard LeGates suggests that both quantitative and qualitative data are integral. He names direct field observation, interviews, and focus groups alongside spatial and statistical analysis as viable tools for doing so. Mattern seems to similarly acknowledge this balance but emphasizes the value of qualitative data during the current digital age. She opines that we need to “draw upon the wisdom” of those who think about knowledge and information processing regularly to help us understand the “breadth of intelligences…within our cities” which would be weakened with only computational logic as a primary driving force.
She continues by complicating the notion of cities as solely “data processors” by posing them as places where information is made, manipulated, and utilized in different ways by humans and technology. The management and the “cultural variables” that texture the larger ecology of urban information are important to acknowledge to properly understand the city and how it functions. It is imperative that we don’t blindly accept data-gathering technology within cities but that we interrogate its role- “what information it claims to be harvesting…and whose interests it serves”.