Software has become essential to the functioning of cities. It is deeply embedded into the systems and infrastructure of the built environment and is entrenched in the management and governance of urban societies. Software-enabled technologies and services enhance the ways in which we understand and plan cities. It even has an effect on how we manage urban services and utilities. Code and the City explores the extent and depth of the ways in which software mediates how people work, consume, communication, travel and play. The reach of these systems is set to become even more pervasive through efforts to create smart cities: cities that employ ICTs to underpin and drive their economy and governance. Yet, despite the roll-out of software-enabled systems across all aspects of city life, the relationship between code and the city has barely been explored from a critical social science perspective. This collection of essays seeks to fill that gap, and offers an interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between software and contemporary urbanism. This book will be of interest to those researching or studying smart cities and urban infrastructure.

Traces the evolution of urban development codes and standards, examines their effect on city planning and design, and proposes alternatives that will encourage innovation.

"Local Code is a prescription for urban health."-Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Architectural Record

Unsparing and important. . . . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic's Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.

Cites speak and this intriguing book might be called The Grammar of Cities since it aims to help us understand the language of cities. Considering the urban environment from the viewpoint of an engaged pedestrian, Urban Code offers 100 ‘lessons’ – maxims, observations, and bite-size truths, followed by short essays that help us learn to read the city. It is a user’s guide to the city, a primer of urban literacy, a key for anyone who is enthralled by urban life at street and sidewalk level. Each lesson is accompanied by an iconic image in addition to the 100 drawings, photographs and film stills - shot in the Manhattan neighbourhood of SoHo - that illustrate the text. The observations originate in SoHo, but what they offer hold true for any cityscape

Code and the city : introduction / Rob Kitchin and Sung-Yueh Perng -- Code, coding, infrastructure, cities -- From a single line of code to an entire city : reframing the conceptual terrain of code/space / Rob Kitchin -- The internet of urban things / Paul Dourish -- Interfacing urban intelligence / Shannon Mattern -- Abstract urbanism / Matthew Fuller And Graham Harwood -- Code-traffic : code repositories, crowds and urban life / Adrian Mackenzie -- Locative media and mobile computing -- Digital social interactions in the city : reflecting on location-based social networks / Luigina Ciolfi And Gabriela Avram -- Feeling place in the city : strange ontologies and location-based social media / Leighton Evans -- Curating the city : urban interfaces and locative media as experimental platforms for cultural data / Nanna Verhoeff and Clancy Wilmott -- Moving applications : a multilayered approach to mobile computing / James Merricks White -- Exploring urban social media: selfiecity and on broadway / Lev Manovich -- Governance, politics, knowledge -- Digital urbanism in crises / Monika Büscher, Xaroula Kerasidou, Michael Liegl and Katrina Petersen -- Coding alternative modes of governance : learning from experimental "peer to peer cities" / Alison Powell -- Encountering the city at hacking events / Sophia Maalsen and Sung-Yueh Perng -- Semantic cities : coded geopolitics and rise of the semantic web / Heather Ford and Mark Graham -- Cities and context : the codification of small areas through geodemographic classification / Alex Singleton

For years, pundits have trumpeted the earthshattering changes that big data and smart networks will soon bring to our cities. But what if cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for thousands of years. Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and civic knowledge—and through technologies including the telephone, telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice—cities have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore. Mattern’s vivid prose takes readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media archaeology to the city’s streets, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.