Yale University Press

Jacobs emerged as a champion of the citizens’ city in the face of her contemporaries’ uncompromising approach—most contentiously, Robert Moses’ highway-based urban efficiency. Jacobs mounted what she herself called “an attack on current city planning and rebuilding,” arguing that there is a higher goal for urban design than promoting high-volume traffic flow.14

r-matching to landscape photos. The user-generated photographic data began to reveal natural ecological conditions like drought and urban green spaces.

Calvino imagined a situation of total recall, where every detail was recorded. What he did not imagine was that individuals would share that information willingly. This is a radical shift from a top-down vision of data collection to a bottom-up vision of data aggregation and dissemination—it is a shift from “Big Brother” to “little sisters.” A (re)distribution of control over information may empower individuals, providing insight into the kind and quantity of data that they create and a choice of what and when to share—even, perhaps, prompting claims to some of the information’s value.

THE ONLY POSSIBLE metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind,” wrote the political scientist Hannah Arendt, “is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.” Susan Sontag agreed