Places Journal announced a forthcoming book “by New School professor and columnist Shannon Mattern” called A City Is Not a Computer, named for an article of the same name; if the article is any indication, the book likely goes right onto my to-get list. The timing is interesting, given the economic collapse of Google’s planned “smart city” in Toronto.

Which is not to say wise. For every reasonable question Y Combinator asked — “How can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their potential?” — there was a preposterous one: “How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)?” That’s Key Performance Indicators, for those not steeped in business intelligence jargon. There was hardly any mention of the urban designers, planners, and scholars who have been asking the big questions for centuries: How do cities function, and how can they function better?