How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables (2019)

“Should cities be run like businesses? Should city services and infrastructure be run by businesses?

For some urban commentators, policy-makers, politicians and corporate lobby groups, the answer is ‘yes’ to both questions. Others are critical of such views, cautious about shifting the culture of city administration from management to entrepreneurship, and transforming public assets and services run for the common good into markets run for profit.

The stories and essays in this book explore how a city might look, feel and function if the business models, practices and technologies of 38 different companies were applied to the running of cities. They ask: what would it be like to live in a city administered using the business model of Amazon (or Apple, IKEA, Pornhub, Spotify, Tinder, Uber, etc.) or a city where critical public services are delivered by these companies?

Collectively, the chapters ask us to imagine and reflect on what kind of cities we want to live in and how they should be managed and governed.”

Contributors: Manuel B. Aalbers, Tooran Alizadeh, James Ash, Sarah Barns, Gavin Brown, Ryan Burns, Matthew Claudel, Jeremy W. Crampton, Ayona Datta, Martin Dodge, Leighton Evans, Jessica Foley, Jennifer Gabrys, Mark Graham, Tony H. Grubesic, Edward Helderop, Kara C. Hoover, Andrew Iliadis, Kurt Iveson, Glenn Kaufmann, Rob Kitchin, Agnieszka Leszczynski, Sophia Maalsen, Shannon Mattern, Harvey J. Miller, Cian O’Callaghan, Nancy Odendaal, Dietmar Offenhuber, Alison Powell, Lizzie Richardson, Gillian Rose, Jathan Sadowski, Kalpana Shankar, Joe Shaw, Harrison Smith, Monica Stephens, Linnet Taylor, Jim Thatcher, Pip Thornton, Anthony Vanky, Alberto Vanolo, Alan Wiig, Katharine Willis, Matthew Zook.

Edited by Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern, and Joe Shaw
Publisher Meatspace Press, London, Oct 2019
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License
ISBN 9780995577671
1357 paragraphs

Review: Jeremy Williams (Int’l J Urban & Regional Research, 2020).

Publisher

PDF, PDF (24 MB)

Computational Culture, 7: Apps and Infrastructures (2019)

A special issue of the journal, dedicated to the research of apps and infrastructure, with a special section on ‘Critical Approaches to Computational Law’ edited by Simon Yuill.

Contributions by Jeremy Wade Morris and Austin Morris; Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, Fernando van der Vlist, and Esther Weltevrede; Rowan Wilken, Jean Burgess, Kath Albury; Esther Weltevrede and Fieke Jansen; Michael Dieter and Nathaniel Tkacz; Stacy E. Wood; Johannes Paßmann; Théo Lepage-Richer; Mara Karagianni; Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, Ama Nyame-Mensah and Allison B. Russell; Winnie Soon; Matthias Plennert, Georg Glasze and Christoph Schlieder.

Edited by Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, David Nieborg, and Fernando van der Vlist
Published in October 2019
Open access
ISSN 2047-2390

HTML, PDFs

Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! An Approach to Underground Music Scenes, 4 vols (2015-2019)

Proceedings from a series of conferences, Keep it Simple, Make it Fast! (KISMIF), held in Porto and dedicated to the analysis of punk manifestations in Portugal and elsewhere since the 1970s.

Edited by Paula Guerra (1-4), Tânia Moreira (1-3) and Thiago Pereira Alberto (4)
Publisher Universidade do Porto, Porto, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019
Open access
ISBN 9789898648495 (vol 1), 9789898648631 (vol 2), 9789898648884 (vol 3), 9789895417919 (vol 4)
584, 297, 288, 592 pages

Conf. review: Christine Feldman-Barrett (Volume!, 2016).

Conference
Research project

Volume 1 (17 MB)
Volume 2 (10 MB)
Volume 3 (9 MB)
Volume 4 (304 MB, updated on 2019-11-8)