Shannon Mattern

Amid a war on public knowledge, libraries are pushing outward, enlarging the commons through new configurations of civic and creative life.

Recent books on the enduring impacts of women architects, libraries as loci of democracy, histories of economic mutualism, white supremacy in public art, and more.

Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there. But cardboard boxes hold a world of meaning — a global apparatus of commerce, consumption, disposal, and reuse.

The best repair manuals present a vision of repair that is social, embodied, intuitive, and accessible. What if we extend these principles beyond material objects, to the scale of civic systems and spaces?

The humble drinking fountain can tell us much about a society’s attitudes towards health, hygiene, equity, and virtue, and about its understanding of public goods and civic responsibilities.

Dementia care is usually marginalized in remote asylums, informal networks, or grim nursing homes. Why can’t entire buildings and whole cities be designed as caring environments writ large?

Trees have served as models of intellectual inquiry and as sites of religious and civic deliberation. Now they are inspiring deeper forms of ecological investigation.

Many pandemic maps depict the macro-scale forces that produced the “Great Pause.” What’s harder to show is all the something enabling that nothing, the pulsing activity powering the pause.

Plexiglass dividers aim to keep us safe amidst a viral pandemic. But there is no perfect seal.

The mechanical operations of a transit system, the social life of a public library, the overload of hospital emergency rooms: all can be intoned through algorhythmic analysis.

The third installment of a narrative survey focusing on the massive move to emergency online instruction.

A visit to the smart-city-in-progress at Sidewalk Toronto prompts questions about what it means to “participate” in civic design.

In what ways do libraries act as ‘instruments of social control,’ and how could they be made into instruments of restoration, reparation, or transformation?

A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations.

Materialized in steel and concrete, patrolled and “performed” by state apparatuses and sensing technologies, the border is charged by the politics of recognition.

Let’s hear it for the neighborhood hardware store. Here, amidst the nuts and bolts, we cultivate the potential to order things, places, communities, politics, and values — we might even say, to build and repair worlds.

As the bioengineering of people and cities converges, where do we locate the public sphere?

Inside the material archives of climate science, which get wilder and dirtier the deeper you go.

How do machine intelligences read and write the world? And what Other intelligences deserve our attention?

Closets are not just for storage. They are also active, generative spaces where media are made and knowledges born.

This seems an obvious truth, but we need to say it loud and clear. Urban intelligence is more than information processing.

Now more than ever, we need to create and defend vital spaces of information exchange. Librarians and archivists should be involved in curating urban data.

On the resurgence of “field guides” in a networked age. We’ve moved from birding to dronewatching, from natural history to dark ecology. But are we still looking through colonialist binoculars?

The world’s most ambitious “smart city” project is here. Should we worry that New York City is becoming an experimental lab?

How the 1939 World’s Fair anticipated our current obsession with urban data science and “smart” cities.

Futuristic control rooms with endless screens of blinking data are proliferating in cities across the globe. Welcome to the age of Dashboard Governance.

Faux-ethnographic dioramas, modern interiors reimagined as psychedelic ruin-worlds, invented histories of proto-architecture: archaeology, as model or metaphor, has been surfacing a lot in art practice and design theory.

Reading room, social service center, innovation lab. How far can we stretch the public library?

As we build so-called “smart” cities, we need to consider the point of engagement where citizens interface with the city’s operating system.

The new wave of urban data science (and solutionism) is trending toward an obsession with data-for-data’s-sake and an idolization of method.

For decades tourists have marveled at monumental dams of the American West. These days they trace infrastructures like satellite communications and nuclear waste transport.

A trip to a special economic zone in South Korea dedicated to books — and high-style architecture — now being remade for the digital era.

One of the most promising dimensions of tactical urbanism is the rise of pop-up, guerrilla, and ad-hoc libraries.