The Programmable City

The programmable city ``[T]he city itself is turning into a constellation of computers.'' Batty (1995) ``The modern city exists as a haze of software instructions.Nearly every urban practice is becoming mediated by code.'' Amin and Thrift (2002, page 125) Software is essential to the functioning of cities.It is deeply and pervasively embedded into the systems and infrastructure of the built environment and in the management and governance of urban societies.Software mediates how we understand and plan cities, how we manage urban services and utilities, and how we live urban lives.As a result, across a diverse set of everyday tasks domestic chores, work, shopping, travelling, communicating, governing, and policingsoftware makes a difference to how social, spatial, and economic life takes place.Such is software's capacities and growing pervasiveness that some analysts predict that we are entering a new phase of `everyware' (Greenfield, 2006); that is, computational power will be distributed and available at any point on the planet.The phenomenal growth in software creation and use is due to its emergent and executable properties: how it codifies the world into rules, routines, algorithms, and databases, and then uses these to do work in the world to render aspects of everyday life programmable.Whilst it is not fully sentient and conscious, software can exhibit some of the characteristics of `being alive' (Thrift and French, 2002).This property is significant because code enables technologies to do work in the world in an autonomous fashionthat is, it can process data, evaluate situations, and make decisions without human oversight or authorisation.In other words, it possesses what Mackenzie (2006) terms `secondary agency'.However, because software is embedded into objects and systems in often subtle and invisible ways, it largely forms a `technological unconscious' that is only noticed when it performs incorrectly or fails (Thrift, 2004).As a consequence, software often appears to be `automagical' in nature, in that it works in ways that are not clear and visible, and it produces complex outcomes that are not easily accounted for by people's everyday experiences (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011).And yet, despite its importance, software, the assemblages that support and promote its production and adoption, and the work that it does in the world are barely theorised and empirically studied from a social sciences perspective.Instead, software has been understood from a technical, instrumental perspective that treats it as largely an immaterial, stable, neutral product, rather than as a complex, multifaceted, mutable set of relations created through diverse sets of discursive, economic, and material practices.Where the role of software has been acknowledged, the focus of analysis has been the technologies and infrastructures that software enables, rather than the underlying nature of software that powers such technologies.The consequence is to study how telematic networks shape, for example, traffic management, but to largely ignore how such effects are manifestly the result of the rules and procedures formalised within the code of management software.The way the discourses and practices of traffic management are translated into the routines and algorithms of code is vitally