“Christine Rosen notes, “You cannot ‘coshape’ an environment” — particularly a painstakingly engineered, shrewdly financed, algorithmically-tuned, master-planned environment — “designed by others to prevent you from influencing it.”” – Instrumental City: The View from New York’s Hudson Yards, circa 2019
Hudson Yards
“While some models of smart urbanism embrace the tools of “e-government” — report-a-pothole apps, for example, or community planning software — they typically lack any means of accommodating user input that challenges the underlying principles and ideologies of the tools.” – Instrumental City: The View from New York’s Hudson Yards, circa 2019
“In a recent article, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid identified three “urban age discourses” that shape our current episteme. Urban triumphalism, as championed by economists like Edward Glaeser, regards the city as an engine of innovation and civilization and prosperity. Sustainable urbanism imagines cities as hotbeds of resilience and environmental consciousness. Finally, technoscientific urbanism reflects a neopositivist return to postwar systems thinking and centralized planning; it is especially visible in the discourse around “smart cities,” which regards the intelligence generated from spatial sensing and data analysis as a “fix” for perennial urban problems.” – Instrumental City: The View from New York’s Hudson Yards, circa 2019