School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemThe city without qualities: Inventing urban computing(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2022-11)Smart city approaches which seek to utilise large-scale flows of urban data have become an exemplar of contemporary geomedia. In this article, I trace the migration of systems analysis and computational modelling from the RAND Institute’s pioneering nuclear war scenarios in the 1950s to their application to a broader set of social and urban problems in the 1960s. Focusing on the influential New York City-RAND Institute established in 1969, I analyse the socio-political context of data-driven approaches to urbanism and urban planning. I argue that the data-driven decision-making enabled by urban computing constitutes a critical threshold in terms of who is able to speak with authority about the city. This provides a productive lens for articulating the early history of urban computation with contemporary debates about smart cities and the ‘platformization’ of urban digital infrastructure.
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ItemUrban Digital Infrastructure, Smart Cityism, and Communication: Research Challenges for Urban E-Planning(IGI Global, 2021-07-01)This article takes stock of the smart city concept by locating it in relation to both a longer history of urban computing, as well as more recent projects exploring the vexed issues of participatory urbanism, data ethics and urban surveillance. The author argues for the need to decouple thinking regarding the potential of urban digital infrastructure from the narrow and often technocentric discourse of 'smart cityism'. Such a decoupling will require continued experimentation with both practical models and conceptual frameworks, but will offer the best opportunity for the ongoing digitization of cities to deliver on claims of 'empowering' urban inhabitants.
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ItemAmbient Images(The Nordic Society for Aesthetics, 2021)