Shannon Mattern

Professor of anthropology at the New School in New York until 2022 and since then professor of media studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Mattern studies how cities have always been media of communication and infrastructures of knowledge. Code and Clay, Data and Dirt (2017) travels five thousand years of cities, from the clay of tablets to optical fibre, to show that urban intelligence did not begin with sensors.

A City Is Not a Computer (2021), developed from her 2017 essay of the same title, is her critique of the smart city: the computer metaphor reduces the city to data and processing and forgets the forms of knowledge that are not digitised, care, memory, the knowledge of librarians, caretakers and neighbours. Her chapters on public libraries as social infrastructure and on municipal dashboards, which she studied with Rob Kitchin, have influenced the critique of governance by data.

Mattern writes often in Places Journal and has mapped New York's media infrastructure, from pneumatic tubes to data centres. She is reproached for a certain nostalgic humanism; her contribution is to remind planners and technologists that the city processes information with streets, buildings and people, and that no dashboard replaces that.