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Collecting over thirty short essays originally
appearing in the British publications Building Design
and RIBA Journal, this book continues the MIT School
of Architecture former dean William J. Mitchell's investigations
into the influence of technology on urban space, architecture
and design. As the current head of the Smart Cities research
group in the school's well-known Media Lab, the professor
and author is situated in an ideal position for such ongoing
academic analysis. These essays, admittedly written at airports
and other non-places during the travels of a global nomad,
indicate a predilection for readable and highly accessible
writing that is as thought-provoking as it is varied.
Locating itself as a record of the middle portion of the
decade coming to a close, Mitchell's book touches on timely
subjects both obvious (the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,
Wal-Mart, the Iraq War) and unexpected (plastic water bottles,
Whole Foods, potato chips as analogies for architectural form).
In all cases, it is his personal take on the topics –
his search for meaning in artifacts beyond functionality –
that makes the reading worthwhile, such as the reeling of
inmate jurisprudence at Guantanamo Bay back to international
transportation and security networks that technology has enabled.
Many of the essays are structured as miniature histories.
Discussing the Gitmo controversy, Mitchell moves from the
16th-century Tower of London to the present day, stopping
in Australia, Nazi Germany and The Gulag Archipelago
on the way. These histories point to an evolutionary treatment
of how we arrived at today's digital culture, denying a break
with history that some critics envision. Like a shaping of
the paradigm-breaking shifts theorized in Thomas Kuhn's The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Mitchell's brief
forays into technologies like digital cameras and computer-aided-drafting
are smoother, more continuous. Amazon's Kindle e-book, as
discussed by Mitchell, is linked to previous artifacts (books)
via intention (reading text on a page) and design (book-size
and with a cover), before the new device is allowed to exploit
its new technology and carry itself in a new direction that
may have people in the future asking, “whatever happened
to books?” (The device's name boldly implies a burning,
a destruction of the book as an artifact.) It happened with
cars and horse-drawn buggies, so why not with Kindle and books?
Or so Mitchell would have us believe.
Mitchell's technocratic views are countered, or complicated,
by an embrace of traditional public space, numerous references
to popular culture and a cynical attitude towards many of
his subjects. The first is most overt in his essay on the
“Wal-Martians” attacking American small towns,
destroying their downtowns and small businesses in the name
of everyday low prices. His common-sense criticism of the
alliance between commerce and public space being trashed by
anonymous big-box stores in a sea of asphalt is appealing,
if hard to align with the technological means in which Wal-Mart
manages to expand its retail empire (just about everywhere
but New York City, it should be noted).
Mitchell's embrace of technology is not value-free, particularly
when something as commendable as the corporation's “brilliant
organization of its global supply network” is accompanied
by low wages, poor to non-existent health benefits and dead
downtowns. The author begins numerous essays with references
to songs, movies and other bits of popular culture, with these
and other essays often concluding with cynical remarks veiled
in ironic humor. These two characteristics of Mitchell's writing
diminish his already readable text, appealing to readers but
without doing his ideas any service.
Two of the book's 32 essays exceed the typical four pages
that separate each. They focus on surveillance and security,
obviously two important considerations in the decade that
started with the events of 9/11, but also highly contested
ones affecting public space. Not surprisingly, he embraces
the careful use of these technologies in the urban realm,
like a latter day Oscar Newman. Calling for civil liberties
while simultaneously developing urban defense strategies lacks
the passion of the critiques he levies against Wal-Mart in
the name of public space. While unfortunate, these essays
are stand-outs in the book and markers in Mitchell's ongoing
investigations, much more than the essay that lends the book
its intriguing title.
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