The City Beautiful Movement and the City Efficiency

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The city beautiful movement was attempt to build a bunch of very expensive things in a lot of cities. And then the city efficient is where you start talking about units to the acre, your engineering things to national or regional specifications. This is where code becomes really popular, right? Like code as in computer code, but also law zoning codes,. The car obviously gets popular and transforms cities around it; when you're using sophisticated technology like a car get specificity and rationalization for it to work. So that's the city efficiency era.

Paris Marx is joined by David A. Banks to discuss how cities have been reshaped to attract tech companies and what the consequences have been for the people who live in them.

David A. Banks is the author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America. He’s a lecturer in the Geography and Planning department at University at Albany, SUNY. David also writers Other Day and co-hosts Iron Weeds. Follow David on Twitter at @DA_Banks.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

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