ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews several philosophers and urban thinkers who have held that cities are technologies, including but not limited to Lewis Mumford, Felix Guattari, Erik Swyngedouw, Hans Jonas, and Edward Glaeser. This review exhibits that viewing the city in this manner has benefits, but it also has inherent limitations and challenges. The goal here is not to outright give up on these positions. Instead, this chapter shows how appealing to the concept of a municipality as a technology avoids many of these issues. It illustrates that this move can advance efforts to make cities support worthwhile goals such as ethical urban sustainability and human flourishing. For instance, if municipalities are technologies, then we can manipulate them to achieve desired outcomes such as these goals. The catch is that doing so involves attending to several stakeholder groups simultaneously. This chapter ends by setting up this problem, the problem of moral prioritization, which is covered in the following chapters.
