A City Is Not a Computer
Shannon Mattern – We should reject data-driven models that delegate critical, often ethical decisions to the machine. Urban intelligence is more than information processing. Urban intelligence involves experience, observation, sensory engagement. We need new models for thinking about cities that do not compute.
We need to expand our repertoire (to borrow a term from Diana Taylor) of urban intelligences, to draw upon the wisdom of information scientists and theorists, archivists, librarians, intellectual historians, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and others who think about the management of information and the production of knowledge. They can help us better understand the breadth of intelligences that are integrated within our cities, which would be greatly impoverished if they were to be rebuilt, or built anew, with computational logic as their prevailing epistemology.
[Read full article at Places Journal site]
