Code and Clay, Data and Dirt by Shannon Mattern dismantles the myth that “smart cities” are a product of the digital age, tracing the deep history of urban intelligence through technologies as ancient as writing and as modern as wireless networks.
About This Book
The smart city debate tends to begin and end in the present tense — with sensors, algorithms, and silicon. Mattern refuses that frame. Drawing on media archaeology, she argues that cities have been encoding, transmitting, and interpreting information for millennia, through laws, street grids, civic institutions, and successive generations of communication technology. The telephone, the telegraph, the printing press, the written word — each represents a moment in a continuous urban negotiation between the physical and the informational, between clay and code. Pitched at the intersection of urban theory, media studies, and cultural history, this book recasts the city itself as a layered communication infrastructure.
Key Features
- 288 pages of historically and geographically wide-ranging urban media analysis
- Author: Shannon Mattern
- Published by University of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 9781517902445
What You’ll Discover
- How urban architecture, street layouts, and civic knowledge systems function as long-standing forms of media and information exchange
- A media archaeology of the city that reframes technologies — from the human voice to the telegraph — as successive layers of urban intelligence
- Why the binary of “analog versus digital” obscures a far older and more complex history of code and materiality in city-making
- How to write urban, media, and cultural histories that move beyond narratives of elite invention and technological revolution
About the Author
Shannon Mattern is the author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, a work that synthesises media archaeology, urban theory, and cultural history into a new account of the intelligent city. Her scholarship spans a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, rendered in prose that makes complex theoretical arguments legible without sacrificing rigour.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 288
- Dimensions: [Details available upon request]
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781517902445
- Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and urban designers thinking critically about smart city discourse, media theorists and cultural historians interested in urban infrastructure, and researchers working at the intersection of technology, space, and communication.