Decoding the City examines how real-time big data is reshaping urban planning and architecture, drawing on research from MIT's SENSEable City Lab to argue that digital data is not merely descriptive — it is material for designing a different urban future.
About This Book
The flows that define contemporary cities — people, goods, refuse, information — have always been difficult to see. Big data makes them visible, and that visibility changes everything. This volume, emerging from MIT's SENSEable City Lab, investigates how the avalanche of real-time urban data is transforming the way planners, architects, and researchers understand and intervene in cities. It moves between optimism and critique: demonstrating how data-driven urbanism enables more flexible responses to infrastructure, transportation, and waste, while also interrogating the risks of pervasive data acquisition and urban surveillance. For design professionals engaging with smart city discourse, this is a grounded, research-backed counterpoint to both hype and dismissal.
Key Features
- 192 pages of research, case studies, and critical analysis at the intersection of urbanism and data science
- Edited by Dietmar Offenhuber and Carlo Ratti
- Case studies developed within the MIT SENSEable City Lab, including large-scale infrastructure and waste-tracking projects
- Published by Birkhauser, ISBN: 9783038215974
What You'll Discover
- How MIT's SENSEable City Lab uses digital data as a design medium — not just an analytical tool — to speculate on alternative urban futures
- Why large-scale infrastructure experience points toward more complex and flexible answers on transportation and waste disposal
- The implications of real-time data streams for the practice of architecture and urban planning at city scale
- The ethical and professional tensions in city-scale data acquisition, including surveillance and control — and how urban disciplines must reckon with them
About the Author
Dietmar Offenhuber and Carlo Ratti co-edited this volume. Carlo Ratti directs the MIT SENSEable City Lab, a leading research centre examining the intersection of digital technology, urban flows, and city infrastructure. Dietmar Offenhuber is a researcher whose work engages urban data, waste, and the politics of infrastructure visualisation.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 192
- Dimensions: 165 x 241 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783038215974
- Publisher: Birkhauser
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Urban designers, planners, and architects engaging with smart city research, academics working at the intersection of data science and urbanism, and design strategists navigating digital infrastructure futures.