Inverting normative city theories and computational urban models: Towards a coexistence with urban data streams

Two unavoidable processes punctuate our century: The unprecedented urbanisation of our planet (United Nations, 2014) and the spread of ubiquitous computing (Weiser, 1991) and urban data streams. This process of urbanisation corresponds with the process of digitalisation of urban life: while urbanisation acts on a physical infrastructural level, the digital develops as a kind of metastructure above the infrastructure. This metastructural level offers a flexible framework through which information is continuously and operatively being symbolized. Today, Information technology and the availability of abundant urban data streams could be considered as forerunners of our time, having unprecedented impacts comparable to the ones brought by the steam engine at the dawn of industrialisation and the electrification of cities. It is therefore no longer conceivable to think of the physical structure of the city without including its digital counterpart. Against this background, we will explore the role of computational power and information technologies as dominant factors in the formation of computational urban models and normative city theories. We will show how these models and theories, emerging mainly during the 19th and 20th centuries, present leaping correspondences with more ancient conceptions of the city, when observed from a meta-level or episteme (Foucault, 2002) approach. First, and for the sake of clarity, we will deal with some methodological 1 This Manuscript is under review at City journal 2 E-mail: [email protected], Department of Architecture, ITA CAAD, ETH Zürich, Switzerland 3 E-mail: [email protected], Department of Architecture, ITA CAAD, ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Web: www.vahidmoosavi.com elucidations around the concepts of theory, model and episteme, and how we will refer conceptually to these terms throughout this paper. Secondly, we will review these evolving technological and computational levels of abstraction and their influence on the different conceptions of the city. Thirdly, we will develop the hypothesis of a conceptual gap, between our current technological capacity – grounded on the abundance and availability of urban data streams – and the state of the art in urban modelling and city theory. Lastly, building upon Foucault’s concept of episteme (Foucault, 1970) and genealogy (Foucault, 1977b), we will explore this gap by speculating around the possibility of an inversion in computational urban modelling and city theory. And above all, we will question the terms in which we can think of the city, in an age where the world can be virtually conceived as fully urban, and the continuity and abundance of urban data streams giving account of it can be taken for granted. How are we articulating the phenomena we call city on top of this generic common ground?