“Monetizing Movement”

2019 Smith, Harrison. “Monetizing Movement.” How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. Ed. Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern, and Joe Shaw (Np: Meatspace Press, 2019), 570-605 [149-56].

The story is in the form of a sales pitch from a company, based on Groundtruth, selling constantly updated location data by accessing phones. All the stories in the book are responses to a recent book, A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Government (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017), by Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman, that proposes, in the editors’ interpretation, that cities should act more like Amazon in dealing with their citizens. The author is a research associate in the Global Urban Research Unit in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University.