Stories about smart cities borrow from techno-discourse a tendency towards placelessness that works to obscure the irreducible specificity of the urban. In these blog entries I will focus instead on a very specific site: Pittsburgh, the city where I live, and whose ongoing history of post-industrial decay and technological reinvention looms large in the imaginary of the smart city. With Pittsburgh as both a subject and site, these blogs aim at delivering a few short historical, speculative, and personal sketches aimed at situating, unsettling, or playfully reconfiguring the fantasies of prediction and control that underpin smart city ideology.

I have a particular interest in these questions. At the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University I direct a research program aimed at rethinking the role of computation in processes of designing, making, and building. I am especially interested in how digital technologies are imagined as participants, modulators, or enablers of design processes, and in approaching these imaginaries as worthy subjects of critical inquiry and creative intervention. From this perspective the move to cast cities as subjects of optimization or predictive inference – and the conceptual shifts this move inscribes for notions of urban governance, ownership, and human life – deserves careful scrutiny.[1]

As the slippery rhetoric of smart city discourse inconspicuously brings computational logics to urban governance and, increasingly, to urban life itself, the pivot towards platforms has the potential to help make these shifts more visible. Centering platforms as objects of urban study, re-making them into urban objects, begins to uncover important questions. What happens to urban life when the city itself is imagined as a platform for intensified regimes of data capture and analysis? What can architectural modes of inquiry do to illuminate, challenge, or subvert these logics?