How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables ed. by Mark Graham et al. (review)

Theorizing the outcomes of future cities operated under the various business and technologies of different global corporations, How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables offers not only an entertaining collection of ideas, but also a view to how else we might communicate research ideas and theory. Implicitly, the collection puts strain on the relevance of the academic publishing model for real-world research dissemination and public engagement. Being freely available online in PDF format on the independent publisher Meatspace Press's website, and featuring a variously successful mix of fact and fiction, How to Run a City Like Amazon challenges notions of genre and form, as well as the hierarchies of high theory and fiction outputs that speculative fiction genres have consistently sought to disrupt.

The collection is the work of an editorial collaboration between digital and physical geographers Mark Graham and Joe Shaw who are both based at the Oxford Internet Institute, anthropologist Shannon Mattern at The New School for Social Research, and human geographer Rob Kitchin at Maynooth University. It features contributions from academics working in fields as diverse as urban design, geography, labor theory, Creative Informatics, ethics of AI, and media studies, all crucially oriented to thinking through the material consequences of the subjugation of urban structuration and governance to corporate strategy and business ethea.

Through an innovative intersection of creative writing and theoretical essays, the collection dwells on the future practical outcomes of large-scale corporatization of cities, through the lens of different business models and the projected outcomes of these. The city-state has long been the site of experimental postulation for systems of government, reaching as far back as More's island city of Utopia and Plato's envisioning of the city-state ruled over by a philosopher king. The philosophy of governance in this collection is the business model, the kings board members, shareholders, and Silicon Valley tech-romantics.

Each contribution takes as its inspiration a company that has global reach, technological dominance, and design innovation in its brand. Organized alphabetically, the collection speculates about the effects of future city-governance and design by the eponymous and ubiquitous Amazon, as well as Bitcoin, Deliveroo, Elsevier, Grindr, Ikea, Pornhub, Spotify, Tesla and Uber, among others. No two companies are repeated, though various iterations of Google products are featured, including Adwords, ARLens, and Fiber. The collection is careful to note at the outset of each contribution that the text that follows is a philosophical undertaking of one kind or another, and any reference to specific brands or companies are intended "for the purpose of conducting a thought experiment without intent to infringe." The power of the collection, however, is the brand identification that the reader has with the businesses that provide the foundation for these thought experiments. The success of the collection is the real-world referents with which a reader might themselves interact. The dystopian energy thus produced in many of the contributions is all the more disturbing for being conceptually proximate to the reader. This is a strength not only of the collection's marketing, but also of its capacity to theorize speculatively without conforming to one genre or another.

The first eponymous section of the collection explains the rationale of the collection, asking, "Do we really want to live in cities run like or by businesses?" The Smart City concept comes under fire as being productive of data-driven dystopias, manifesting in various forms depending on the business ethos of the company that lends its name to the thought experiment. It is equally interesting and significant that while almost all of the contributors are academics, they were offered the choice of writing speculative fiction or "a more conventional academic style paper" and...