Solutionism in Urban Data Science

What do corporate smart-city programs have in common with D.I.Y. science projects and civic hackathons?

“Theirs is a city with an underlying logic,” writes Shannon Mattern, “made more efficient — or just, or sustainable, or livable — with a tweak to its algorithms or an expansion of its dataset.”

On Places, Mattern argues that the new wave of urban data science (and solutionism) is trending toward an obsession with data-for-data’s-sake and an idolization of landscape research methods.