Adam Greenfield at Medialab Katowice (cropped)

Adam Greenfield is an American writer and urbanist, based in London. He was born in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

in 1968.

Early life

Greenfield attended

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

, graduating with a degree in Cultural studies in 1989. Between 1995 and 2000, he served as a psychological operations specialist (later sergeant) in the United States Army’s Special Operations Command.

Career

After leaving the Army, Greenfield took up work in the then-nascent field of

information architecture Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability; and an emerging ...

for the World Wide Web, holding a succession of positions culminating in employment at the

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...

office of Razorfish, where he was head of information architecture. In the 2006 and 2007 academic years, with Kevin Slavin, he co-taught a class at New York University's

Interactive Telecommunications Program The New York University Tisch School of the Arts (commonly referred to as Tisch) is the performing, cinematic and media arts school of New York University. Founded on August 17, 1965, Tisch is a training ground for artists, scholars of the ar ...

called Urban Computing. In the following academic year the class was renamed Urban Experience in the Network Age, and Greenfield taught it alone. From 2008 to 2010 he was

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

's head of design direction for user interface and services, residing in

Helsinki Helsinki ( or ; ; sv, Helsingfors, ) is the capital, primate, and most populous city of Finland. Located on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, it is the seat of the region of Uusimaa in southern Finland, and has a population of . The city ...

throughout the assignment. In 2010 he returned to New York City and founded an urban-systems design practice called Urbanscale, which describes their work as "design for networked cities and citizens." In September 2013, Greenfield was awarded the inaugural Senior Urban Fellowship at the

LSE Cities LSE Cities is a research centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The purpose of the centre is to increase knowledge and understanding of how people and cities interact in a rapidly urbanising world, focusing on how the phys ...

centre of the

London School of Economics The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is a public university, public research university located in London, England and a constituent college of the federal University of London. Founded in 1895 by Fabian Society members Sidn ...

, relocated to London, and taught in the MArch Urban Design programme at the

Bartlett School of Architecture Bartlett may refer to: Places * Bartlett Bay, Canada, Arctic waterway * Wharerata, New Zealand, also known as Bartletts United States * Bartlett, Illinois ** Bartlett station, a commuter railroad station * Bartlett, Iowa * Bartlett, Kansas ...

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

Publications

*2006: ''Everyware: The Dawning Age of

Ubiquitous Computing Ubiquitous computing (or "ubicomp") is a concept in software engineering, hardware engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using ...

'' (), which has been called "groundbreaking" by Bruce Sterling: "One puts it down with a strange conviction that web-designers have transcended geekdom and achieved Zen soulfulness." *2007: ''Urban Computing and Its Discontents'' (), (co-author) an overview of informatics for urban environments *2013: ''Against the Smart City'' (). *2017: '' Radical Technologies'' (,

Verso ' is the "right" or "front" side and ''verso'' is the "left" or "back" side when text is written or printed on a leaf of paper () in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet. Etymology The terms are shortened from Latin ...

), about the relationship between new technologies and social forces leading to their adoption or rejection. Writing for ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', Stephen Poole called the book "tremendously intelligent and stylish", and comparing Greenfield's view of the future with

The Culture The Culture is a fictional interstellar post-scarcity civilisation or society created by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks and features in a number of his space opera novels and works of short fiction, collectively called the Culture series. ...

novels from Iain M. Banks.

References

External links

Greenfield's personal siteUrbanscale"Urban Computing and its Discontents", a freely downloadable pamphlet co-authored with Mark Shepard
{{DEFAULTSORT:Greenfield, Adam American technology writers 1968 births Living people Writers from Philadelphia Writers from London 21st-century American non-fiction writers