I’m all for making data work for San Francisco, a city I know well and which strives to be “smart.” But then I think of Palermo, Sicily, a city I know a little bit. It has similar aspirations, but they start from a much different place — with a warm, rich indigenous culture that’s not so easily handled by algorithms.
A few years back at my relative’s house in Sicily just west of Palermo, eleven people crowded around her kitchen table about 9 on a Wednesday night. They joked, talked, nibbled, drank a little bit of my cousin’s white table wine.… Read the rest “Algorithmic city, Sicilian style”