ContentsIntroduction: Ether/Ore1. Waves and Wires: Cities of Electric Sound2. Steel and Ink: The Printed City3. Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis: Aggregating Histories of Writing and Urbanization4. Speaking Stones: Voicing the CityConclusion: Coding Urban Pasts and FuturesAcknowledgmentsNotes Index

"Code and Clay, Data and Dirt has style and method, originality and purpose. Each dig into this exceptional work has brought pleasure and scholarly respect."—Malcolm McCullough, author of Digital Ground"Code and Clay, Data and Dirt is a vital new contribution to media archaeology. Using multisensory, archival, and speculative methods, this book’s riveting journey through the deep time of media explores how cities inscribe, transmit, perform, and reverberate. Responding to the current fascination with big data and smart cities, Shannon Mattern powerfully demonstrates that cities have always been sites of urban intelligence."—Lisa Parks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology"This is highly synthetic and sophisticated work, and Shannon Mattern is generous to her readers, serving as an informed guide to a complex past. She pushes us to a rich archaeological encounter with the layered presence of the past, as well as its vanished remains and traces, to think about ways of reading the world in its full artifactuality. The book is a wonderfully vivid account and analysis of the intersections of media technologies and urban landscapes."—Johanna Drucker, University of California, Los Angeles"Shannon Mattern has long been a go-to source for provocative and insightful accounts of cities and media, and cities as media. Now at last we have her book-length, cultural materialist history of mediated cities, and it is wonderful. Beautifully written and genuinely interdisciplinary, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt will be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the media's temporal and geographical urban entanglements."—Gillian Rose, University of Oxford