This event will bring together authors of two recent books about urban data, intelligence, activism and the public good: Sarah Williams’ Data Action: Using Data for Public Good and Shannon Mattern’s A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. In Data Action, Sarah Williams provides a guide for working with data in more ethical and responsible ways. Big data can be used for good--from tracking disease to exposing human rights violations – and for bad – implementing surveillance and control. Data inevitably represents the ideologies of those who control its use; data analytics and algorithms too often exclude women, the poor, and ethnic groups. Too often data has been used – and manipulated – to make policy decisions without much stakeholder input. Williams outlines a method that emphasizes collaboration among data scientists, policy experts, data designers, and the public. This approach creates trust and co-ownership in the data by opening the process to those who know the issues best. Computational models of urbanism — smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration — promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. Shannon Mattern’s A City Is Not a Computer reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the “city-as-computer” metaphor, which undergirds much of today’s urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms.