Talking Headways Podcast: How Media Has Shaped the City

Author Shannon Mattern joins the podcast this week to discuss her new book, Code+Clay, Data+Dirt: 5,000 Years of Urban Media. Shannon is a professor of media studies at the New School in New York City, and she tells us why she wanted to teach about the intersection of her discipline with architecture and cities.

We talk about why the perfect future interface humans are looking for does not exist, and how digital mapping can overlook important aspects of the urban spatial landscape.

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Talking Headways Podcast: Why a City Is Not a Computer

By Jeff Wood |
This week we’re joined by Shannon Mattern, professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research, who talks with us about her new book, "A City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences." We discuss the ideas of smartness versus wisdom, maintenance as a way of absorbing information, and the city as a processing machine.

Talking Headways Podcast: Critiquing the Language of Planners

By Jeff Wood |
This week, Robin Rather of Collective Strength joins the podcast to talk about missteps in the planning profession - including how things go wrong with language. Robin shares how she got to thinking about urban issues and why she believes current planning practice is stuck in the 1990s. We discuss the often jargon-filled language the profession uses, taking a paragraph from Austin’s current zoning code rewrite to illustrate.

Mapping the Smells and Sounds of the Sensory City

By Jeff Wood |
Daniele Quercia and Luca Aiello of Bell Labs are pioneers of sensory mapping in cities. They have been able to map smells, sounds, and how people feel on their favorite walking routes. On the podcast Daniele and Luca discuss why people are so focused on noise instead of sound, the languages of smell and sound, as well as the chromatic layers […]

Talking Headways Podcast: A New Path for Urban Mobility

By Jeff Wood |
Paul Mackie of Mobility Lab joins me this week to discuss transportation demand management (TDM), urban mobility, and how cities need to adapt to change the transportation status quo. I ask Paul how he got into transportation and biking, and why messages about active transportation should be more positive, instead of making us feel at risk and less likely to ride. […]

Talking Headways Podcast: 100 Years of Cincinnati’s Incomplete Subway

By Jeff Wood |
Jake Mecklenborg, a contributor to Streetsblog Network member Urban Cincy and author of Cincinnati’s Incomplete Subway: The Complete History, joins us this week to talk about Cincinnati’s geography, how a subway would be useful, and why there were numerous attempts to build one. Tune in and learn about the world events that kept pushing back the construction timeline of the […]