Undoing Optimization
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Civic Action in Smart Cities
Alison B. Powell
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Format: HardcoverPrice: $32.50
A unique examination of the civic use, regulation, and politics of communication and data technologies
City life has been reconfigured by our use—and our expectations—of communication, data, and sensing technologies. In this book Alison Powell examines the civic use, regulation, and politics of these technologies, looking at how governments, planners, citizens, and activists expect them to enhance life in the city. She argues that the de facto forms of citizenship that emerge in relation to these technologies represent sites of contention over how governance and civic power should operate. These sites become more significant as an increasingly urbanized and polarized world faces new struggles over local participation and engagement. The author moves past the usual discussion of top-down versus bottom-up civic action and instead explains how citizenship shifts in response to technological change and particularly in response to issues related to pervasive sensing, big data, and surveillance in “smart cities.”
Alison B. Powell is associate professor of media and communication at the London School of Economics and Political Science and is affiliated with the Ada Lovelace Institute.
“Undoing Optimization charts the complex intersections of smart cities and civic action. By deftly examining imaginaries of technological systems and citizenship, Powell contributes an important study in urban optimization.”—Jennifer Gabrys, author of How to Do Things with Sensors
Publication Date: April 13, 2021
