Archinect - News

Welcome to the Hudson Yards, c. 2019: the world's most ambitious "smart city" experiment

2016-04-26T20:55:00-04:00

The observation deck won’t be finished for a few years yet. If you want to see the future of New York, walk north along the High Line, round the curve at the rail yards, and turn your back to the river. Amid the highway ramps and industrial hash of far-west Manhattan, a herd of cranes hoists I-beams into the sky. This is Hudson Yards, the largest private real-estate development in United States history and the test ground for the world’s most ambitious experiment in “smart city” urbanism.

Last year, I reviewed Mattern's book Deep Mapping the Media City, in which she delves into some of the issues surrounding so-called "smart cities." Check out the review here.

For more on the implementation of surveillance and other technologies in the city, check out these links:

Book Review: Shannon Mattern's "Deep Mapping the Media City"

2015-06-13T10:56:00-04:00

Amid the seemingly endless barrage of new writings about the imminent arrival of the technologically mediated “smart city,” a slim volume published by the University of Minnesota Press suggests that so-called intelligent urbanism might not be so new after all. In Deep Mapping the Media City, author Shannon Mattern, an associate professor at the School of Media Studies at the New School, argues cities have been “mediated, and intelligent, for millenia.” Rather than arbitrary ruptures, our cities have developed over time, as new infrastructural developments build off – or plug into – the infrastructure of the past.

Mattern takes a broad look at contemporary urban discourses, and compellingly advocates for an “urban media archaeology,” a “materialist, multisensory approach to exploring the deep material history” of our cities. She makes clear that her invocation of archaeology shouldn’t be read as part of the proliferation of the Foucauldian genealogical methodology en vogue in academia...

Precedents for Experimentation: Talking Libraries with Shannon Mattern and Nate Hill

2014-07-16T16:15:00-04:00

The challenge requires sophisticated understanding of the resources — human, physical, digital, spatial, and civic — that libraries offer to their users. In the conversation below, Shannon Mattern, a scholar who works on libraries, archives, and media infrastructures, and Nate Hill, Deputy Director of the Chattanooga Public Library, talk about what these resources are, how they are evolving, and what design can contribute to how they are deployed.