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This event will bring together authors of two recent books about urban data, intelligence, activism and the public good: Sarah Williams’ Data Action: Using Data for Public Good and Shannon Mattern’s A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences.
In Data Action, Sarah Williams provides a guide for working with data in more ethical and responsible ways. Big data can be used for good—from tracking disease to exposing human rights violations—and for bad—implementing surveillance and control. Data inevitably represents the ideologies of those who control its use; data analytics and algorithms too often exclude women, the poor, and ethnic groups. Too often data has been used and manipulated to make policy decisions without much stakeholder input. Williams outlines a method that emphasizes collaboration among data scientists, policy experts, data designers, and the public. This approach creates trust and co-ownership in the data by opening the process to those who know the issues best.
Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. Shannon Mattern’s A City Is Not a Computer reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the “city-as-computer” metaphor, which undergirds much of today’s urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms.
Presented by The School of Constructed Environments at Parsons School of Design. The event is hosted as part of the 2021 Archtober Festival.
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Shannon is a Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities, Deep Mapping the Media City, and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press. In addition to writing dozens of articles and book chapters, she also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places, a journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape, and she collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.
Sarah is an Associate Professor of Technology and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she is also Director of the Civic Data Design Lab and the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. She combines her training in computation and design to create communication strategies that expose urban policy issues to broad audiences and create civic change. Sarah calls the process Data Action, which is also the name of her recent book published by MIT Press. Her design work has been widely exhibited including work in the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Venice Biennale, and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Sarah has won numerous awards including being named one of the top 25 technology planners and Game Changer by Metropolis Magazine. Check out her latest exhibition, Visualizing NYC 2021, at the Center for Architecture in New York City.
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