A city is not a computer

The city as computer model likewise conditions urban design, planning, policy, and administration—even residents’ everyday experience—in ways that hinder the development of healthy, just, and resilient cities. We have seen that urban ecologies “process” data by means that are not strictly algorithmic, and that not all urban intelligences can be called “information.” One can’t “process” the local cultural effects of long-term weather patterns or derive insights from the generational evolution of a neighborhood without a degree of sensitivity that exceeds mere computation. Urban intelligence of this kind involves site-based experience, participant observation, sensory engagement. We need new models for thinking about cities that do not compute, and we need new terminology. We need to think about urban epistemologies that embrace memory and history; that recognize spatial intelligence as sensory and experiential; that consider other species’ ways of knowing; that appreciate the wisdom of local crowds and communities; that acknowledge the information embedded in the city’s facades, flora, statuary, and stairways; that aim to integrate forms of distributed cognition paralleling our brains’ own distributed cognitive processes.