"The Civic Method"

2019 Claudel, Matthew. “The Civic Method.” How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables. Ed. Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern Shaw, and Joe Shaw (Np: Meatspace Press, 2019), 446-74 [100-109].

After an unexplained collapse, many cities are run on the model of the book publisher Elsevier, which is in competition with cities run by Springer, Taylor and Francis, and the rapidly growing Routledge. Each city completely controls every aspect of its citizens lives. The only threat on the horizon is in the Midwest of the United States where Open Access is growing. 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 doctoral student at MIT, co-founder of the MITdesignX program, where he is head of Civic Innovation, and co-author of Open Source Architecture (Thames & Hudson, 2015) and The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life (Yale University Press, 2016), both with Carlo Ratti, who is a Professor of Urban Planning at MIT and Director of the MIT Senseable City Lab.