Urban Computing and Its Discontents was the first of nine pamphlets produced by The Architectural League of New York  back in 2007, all of which are free to download here.

Under the series title of ‘Architecture and Situated Technologies’ these nine publications were intended to contribute to a burgeoning literature on ubiquitous technology. Adam Greenfield (author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing) and Mark Shepard author this initial architectural overview.

Wholly comprised of a conversation between the two, Urban Computing provides a fuzzy introduction to the cross-fertilizing worlds of urban computing and ‘ambient informatics’. The majority of it stretches out the rather banal aspects of the sentient city, with a heavy emphasis on advertising, marketing and consumption. Sometimes I’m hard pushed to really get into some of the grey literature on technology and urbanism, and find myself returning to geographical base, as it were. Partly that’s to do with my preconceptions on those in the field of architecture and design, and a rather site-specific and (quite honestly) short-sighted approach to urban malaise. I’ll see where pamphlet two (download here) takes me.