Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • “Aesthetic & ethical urbanisms”: Dobraszczyk (2019), Future Cities

    Dobraszczyk, P. (2019). Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination. Reaktion Books. Good, passionate arguments here from my friend Dobraszczyk, making a case for future urban imaginaries as a necessary component of our collective coping with an uncertain future. Note his explicit disavowal of the predictive mode, and the arguments in favour of the imagination as…

  • Sadowski & Bendor (2019), Selling smartness: Corporate narratives and the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary

    Sadowski, J., & Bendor, R. (2019). Selling smartness: Corporate narratives and the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(3), 540-563. This one’s a doozy; does exactly what it says on the tin, on the basis of a deep and comparative dive into “smart city” documentation from IBM and Cisco. A…

  • Media archaeology with dirty hands: Mattern (2017), Code and Clay, Data and Dirt

    Mattern, S. (2017). Code and clay, data and dirt: Five thousand years of urban media. U of Minnesota Press. This is an exemplary introduction chapter for many reasons, and one of things I admire most about it is the tone: it’s critical of the “smart cities” memeplex, without a doubt – framing the book’s project…

  • First There is an Island

    Later this week I’ll be taking a trip down the country, and also down the years. On Sunday 12th June, I’ll be reading a poem in Sandown on the Isle of Wight. I started off writing poetry seriously around 2004 or so, as a kind of preliminary to practicing the longer forms of writing that…

  • UAV god-trick

    There is something sublime and hypnotic about seeing the earth from above. Before drones, satellites and helicopters provided such views, but this God-like perspective was never so abundant, nor accompanied by such elegant silence. As I sat there, I fell into a kind of trance, such that the images began to seem removed not only…