How cities learn : urban experimentation for creating and governing technology

As technologies become increasingly complex and embedded in cities, they are less and less intelligible with existing urban governance frameworks. In response, actors in cities around the world are taking up urban experimentation. The goal of this dissertation is twofold: to understand how urban experimentation enables actors to create and govern technology that generates civic value, and under what conditions it contributes to social, economic and political adaptation over time. This is a question of how cities learn. An urban experiment is an intervention with a sociotechnical system in the public realm. It is explicitly bounded in space and time, it involves groups of actors from different sectors, and its goal is to evaluate the intervention. I elaborate civic value as an evaluative lens, and turn to pragmatist and evolutionary theories of political epistemology to provide a theoretical foundation for understanding market and state adaptation as a collective learning process.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Claudel, Matthew(Matthew Christopher)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dennis Frenchman.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127620

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127620