What I Am Reading: "The Municipalists" by Seth Fried

This book was a love letter to urban planning. Set in yet another thinly-veiled NYC called "Metropolis," it was the story of an initially colorless bureaucrat in a fantastically large, well-funded, and useful government agency as he partners with a crackpot supercomputer to foil the schemes of the Metropolis section head, who has gone rogue and is masterminding an anti-gentrification terrorist plot.

I feel like "roguish robot" has become something of an archetype by now, what with your HK-47 and your GLaDOS and whatnot. This is not even the first novel I've read that featured a robot disrupting his own processes to simulate intoxication: that honor would have to go to I-5YQ in the "Medstar" novels of the Star Wars: Clone Wars multimedia project, also known as "The Star Wars M*A*S*H novels." Anyway, the main character is initially portrayed as hopelessly square, but becomes much moure of an action hero as the situation grows more serious. He also has a soulful appreciation for technocratic urban planning that I am on the same wavelength for. The more radical, philosophical side of urban studies comes in for a skewering; this theorizing is what I find more fun to read, but it can certainly lean toward pretentiousness. The skewering is well played though:

"Elsewhere I noticed she had included quotes from people like Herbert Moreau and Anaximander Bernard...Moreau had investigated the twentieth-century French penal system by continually confessing to crimes he hadn't committed in order to serve out the sentences. Bernard had the distinction of being the first ever self-described anarchist city planner." (p. 154).

Fictional, but so plausible! Anyway, there is enough ambiguity introduced that the technocratic, status-quo, accidentally-elitist side of urban planning is criticized as well, so by the end of the book I was pleased with the balance.

I wasn't quite sure why the book was set in "Metropolis" instead of in New York, but all of the bridges and neighborhoods and colleges have bland enough anglophone names that I bought them as real places in an American city. The book was a fun little commentary on urban planning, and I am left wondering if I should recommend it to my urbanist friends and former professors.