Urban Operating Systems: Producing the Computational City

by Andres Luque-Ayala, Simon Marvin

Overview

An exploration of the modest potentials and serious contradictions of reconfiguring urban life through computational operating systems.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262360999
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	12/15/2020
Series:	Infrastructures
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Andrés Luque-Ayala is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK. Simon Marvin is Director of The Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii 
Chapter Credits xi 
1 Introduction: Producing the Computational City 1 
2 Operationalization: Diagramming the City through the Urban OS 27 
3 Datafication: The Making of Data-as-Infrastructure 55 
4 Sensing: Commodification through Hyperfragmentation 81 
5 Mapping: The Computational Production of Territory 105 with Flávia Neves Maia 
6 Prediction: The City as a Calculative Machine 129 
7 Circulation: Maintaining Urban Flows under Turbulence 149 
8 Resistance? Civic Hacking and an Operating System for Urban Occupation 177 
9 Conclusion: The Urban OS as a Political Technology 209 
Notes 225 
References 237 
Index 271

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Urban Operating Systems offers the essential synthesis that so many analyses have missed. It combines a history of modern digital utopias with a contemporary field guide to messier collisions between computational ecosystems in urban space.”
—Kate Easterling, Professor, Yale School of Architecture
 
“Luque-Ayala and Marvin bring alive the concept of urban operating systems through their expansive and in-depth research. From hacking and sensing to datafication and prediction, their work makes a crucial contribution to understanding—and transforming—computational cities.”
—Jennifer Gabrys, Chair in Media, Culture, and Environment, University of Cambridge
 
“A theoretically nuanced, empirically rich, historically grounded, and accessible account of the development of the computational city. Urban Operating Systems provides an essential guide to how digital technologies have reshaped urban imaginations, infrastructure, governance, and governmentality.”
—Rob Kitchin, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
 
“Through this incisive study, Luque-Ayala and Marvin allow us to revisit our cities through the functional logics of their operating systems, and to consider how our own human means of sensing and processing and circulating map onto the ways intelligent machines accomplish similar tasks.”
—Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology, The New School; author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt?