So you’re interested in what you can read to become a better designer, architect, urban planner, urbanist, or neighbour living and working in a super-divers city? Here are a few recommendations from our Designing Cities For All (DCFA) team, and we will add new recommendations periodically. For all you city designers that want to empower yourself (and others), let these reads guide your practice of transforming cities for the better.
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Race after Technology cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce white supremacy and deepen social inequity. Author Ruha Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encodes inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.
€ 20,99 (order here with 10% discount)
In Blindspot, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. By gaining awareness, we can adapt beliefs and behaviour and ‘outsmart the machine’ in our heads so we can be fairer to those around us. Venturing into this book is an invitation to understand our own minds.
€ 18,95 (order here)
*) With code DCFA2122 you get a 10% discount at Atheneum Bookstore on non-Dutch publications. Use the order links to be referred to the shop.
