Algorithms
Urban algorithms are the automatic rules that decide things in the city without anyone seeing them: where police patrol, which area the ambulance serves first, who is allocated a home, what price the platform shows. They inherit the biases of the data they are trained on and apply them at scale.
Predictive policing is the most studied case: trained on past arrests, it sends more patrols to already over-policed neighbourhoods and confirms its own prediction. Housing allocation or dynamic pricing algorithms share the same structure. The question is not whether to use algorithms but who audits them.
Videos on this term (8)
- Urban ecology
Unequal Connection: Stephen Graham and Technology in the City
Stephen Graham shows that transport, energy and data networks are a geography of power: fragmentation, bypass,…
Stephen Graham 3 min read - Urban economy
The Heart Beats at the Last Mile: What Delivery Costs the City
How much city it takes for a parcel to arrive in two hours: sheds on the periphery, ghost supermarkets, more…
3 min read - Urban AI
Algorithms That Decide Your Rent in Spain and the United States
Revenue management programs pool landlords' data and recommend rents that rise all at once: how they work, the…
3 min read - Urban AI
Who Controls the City When Software Is Privately Owned?
When a company operates a city's sensors and algorithms, the vendor governs: lock-in, algorithmic opacity, the…
3 min read - Urban AI
Technopolitics and Urban Governance per Kitchin and Jasanoff
Urban technopolitics decides who owns a city's data and which algorithms govern. What Rob Kitchin and Sheila…
3 min read - Surveillance / data
Urban Security and Technology: Surveillance (Lyon and Graham)
Cameras, drones and facial recognition are transforming urban security. What David Lyon and Stephen Graham explain,…
3 min read - Urban economy
Platform Economy and Urban Work: Precarity and Regulation
The platform economy turned couriers and drivers into self-employed workers managed by algorithms. What Nick…
3 min read - Urban AI
Industry 4.0 and Cities: How It Transforms Urban Mobility
Industry 4.0 brings sensors, artificial intelligence and electromobility to the city. What changes in transport,…
3 min read
