Civic Views: The Form of the City
Civic Views: The Form of the City
A conversation between State Senator Nikil Saval and art and urban studies scholar Dr. Shannon Mattern on the architecture, design, and infrastructure of the city. They will discuss the reflexive relationship between spaces of civil servant work, the maintenance and delivery of public services, and the shifting perception of the public sector. This event is a part of Civic Views, a temporary public art project celebrating the city’s municipal employees and their diverse perspectives on Philadelphia through a poetic picturing of their office windows by artist Emilio Martínez Poppe and curated by Jameson Paige.
Shannon Mattern is currently the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies, with a secondary appointment in History of Art, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She is currently serving as the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress, a position nominated by the Librarian of Congress. Mattern is also the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council, a state-funded, member-supported, non-profit network connecting hundreds of libraries and archives; she previously served on Metro’s board of directors and later as its president. Prior to Mattern’s arrival at Penn, she worked for 18.5 years at The New School, in New York, where she served on the faculty in both the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies. Mattern’s writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; sites where data intersect with art and design; and media that shape our sensory experiences. She is the author of four books: The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Dirt and Data: 5000 Years of Urban Media (winner of the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture from the Media Ecology Association), all published by the University of Minnesota Press; and A City Is Not a Computer, published by Princeton University Press in 2021. She also (co-)edited four collections on urban technology and quotidian media practices (“Media Study Beyond Media Studies: Pandemic Lessons for an Evolving Field,” “Digital Frictions” (with Mariana Mogilevich and Josh McWhirter), How to Run a City Like Amazon (with Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, and Joe Shaw), and “Notes, Lists & Everyday Inscriptions”).
Senator Nikil Saval is a writer, and organizer representing Pennsylvania’s First Senatorial District, which lies in the heart of Philadelphia. Saval’s commitment to solidarity and justice for working people, and his skill at coalition building, carried him from his roots as a labor organizer to the Pennsylvania General Assembly, where he currently serves as Democratic Chair of the Senate’s Urban Affairs & Housing Committee and Chair of the Senate’s Philadelphia Delegation. Saval has focused his legislative work on critical response to Pennsylvania’s ongoing housing, mass incarceration, wage, and climate crises, while simultaneously pushing for deep structural change so that communities across the Commonwealth have the resources and support they need to thrive. One of his important legislative victories is the groundbreaking Whole-Home Repairs Program, which establishes a one-stop shop for home repairs and weatherization in each county in Pennsylvania while building up a local workforce and creating new, family-sustaining jobs in a growing field. As a writer, Saval has published extensively in The New York Times and The New Yorker, covering architecture, design, and housing. Saval previously served as co-editor of the literary journal n+1 and currently serves on its board of directors. In 2014, Saval published his book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, in which he examined the long-term evolution of the office from its roots in 19th century counting houses all the way to the cubicle, ultimately presenting a world in which workplaces, and the lives of the workers within them, can be improved in the future. Saval has continued to write while in office. A recent op-ed features his analysis of Pennsylvania’s bloated criminal legal system. After the death of Daniel Ellsberg, Saval reflected on his life and political legacy in an article in n+1.