February 15 : Urban Intelligence before “Smartness”

Lab: 4-4:30pm: Making Center Tour with Mick Hondlik: meet @ Tool Checkout

Discussion: Predecessors to Smart Cities

Supplemental Resources:

  • Cambridge’s Centre for Urban Conflicts Research.
  • John de Boer, “Resilience and the Fragile City,” Our World (August 25, 2015).
  • Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (New York: Verso, 2014).
  • Indexical Landscapes” Symposium, ArtCenter College of Design, October 2016.
  • Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
  • Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
  • Clare Lyster, Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change our Cities (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016).
  • Ned Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares (New York: Routledge, 2016).
  • Anthony Townsend, “The $100 Billion Jackpot,” “Cybernetics Redux,” “Cities of Tomorrow” in Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: Norton, 2013): 19-114.

Alternative Unknowns Lab: using the Extrapolation Factory’s Alternative Unknowns method, we’ll model a smart-city disaster scenario: what “old school” intelligences would we have to rely on if our smart city suffered a massive, long-term power outage?

Photo : A 1930s advertisement for the Rand Numeric System highlighted its use by the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. [Hagley Museum]