The piece hardly says anything concrete. Yes most real world problems can't be solved or optimized computationally. Most of the smart cities is just PR for tech conglomerates but I do feel there's so so much you could achieve by modeling the cities computationally. Better traffic management, better street lighting, planning roads, energy harvesting and sustainability,you name it. There's a lot to gain from simulation, digital twinning and digital control.
>Instead of more gratuitous parametric modeling, 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.
I don't know if the authors of this article are substantially less guilty of abstractionism and impracticality than Sidewalk Labs or whoever. Knowing how pigeons understand cities might be interesting, but I'm not sure it's interesting enough to center urbanism around. The wisdom of local communities can be seen in angry letters to the council about how bike lanes are satanic, contemporary statuary seems to be about giving a well-connected artist a big chunk of cash to make something that the residents of a city find unpleasant to look at.
> The wisdom of local communities can be seen in angry letters to the council about how bike lanes are satanic
This is such a stupid dismissal and a provides a great example of what the article is trying to point out. This paternalistic ultramodernist and nearly authoritarian "we know better" mentality.
Okay, to put it differently, hyper-local community decision-making, in isolation, might make decisions that are good for that particular community at the cost of the rest of a city. People don't want bike lanes on their street because it means less on-street parking and more difficulty pulling out onto the road, even if they broadly think cycling is a good idea. People can make reasonable decisions that are in the interests of the "community", and it leads to dysfunction. Doesn't mean "we know better" it means coordination has to happen on a higher level.
They knew we'd be having this conversation way back in 1976.
> It seems that even general structural configurations, such as graphs or digraphs with certain specified properties, will fail to characterize a city, whose complexity, at this stage, may well continue to be understood more readily through negative rather than positive descriptions.
(pedantry: just about everything can be reduced to computation, just not necessarily deterministic computation)
A major difference between cities and computers is that cities self-organise. (the larger ones organise not only themselves but also their suburbs and rural hinterlands; for the US context see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area but note that countries are ephemeral with regard to cities)
see also Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (1969)
Ant colonies self-organize, but they don't do any useful computation for us. What meaningful sense is there to calling things computers which aren't machines we've designed to compute for us?
Good point; what I had been trying to say is that software (and especially hardware) is architected, but architecting cities usually leads to problems.
> just about everything can be reduced to computation,
This is not a precise statement. What is meant by "reduced" and "computation?" "Computation" in often used in a hand wavy manner similar to how some people use "economics" to gobble up everything.
Computation as defined in computer science is, first and foremost, not an objective phenomenon, only a formal model (inspired or meant to formalize "effective methods") that can be simulated using various natural phenomena, but primarily using pen and paper. But there is nothing objectively computational going on in those natural phenomena. An abacus is not counting. A mechanical computer isn't adding. An electronic computer isn't really computing, because there is no objective phenomenon known as computation, except as a mental operation. We call something a computer for only one reason: it can be interpreted in a computational manner.
Another feature of computation models is that they are formalizations. Formalization, by definition, involves "desemantification", leaving us with a residue of gutted forms and some syntactic rules to work with. Formalization lends itself to mechanization.
I am reminded of an adjacent observation of Russell's on the subject of physics. Physics intentionally ignores everything about reality that doesn't yield to mathematical description. That's part of the method, and indeed, a good deal of the particular success of physics, and the physical sciences in general, is due to this approach. To declare that physics is all there is is shear selection bias. You confine your investigation to only those things that physics can handle, and then declare that, because physics has been successful handling such things, physics is all there is.
computation: producing a sequence of states via non-arbitrary transitions between them (generally starting with an initial state and possibly winding up in a terminal state that recurs indefinitely)
Yes, that is hand wavy, but it's what I had meant.
> An abacus is not counting. A mechanical computer isn't adding. An electronic computer isn't really computing, because there is no objective phenomenon known as computation, except as a mental operation. We call something a computer for only one reason: it can be interpreted in a computational manner.
Nothing in this statement distinguishes computation from any other category of thought. The same case can and has been made for trees. These are empty words.
Absolutely, I wish we would get rid of this cult-like devotion to the private sector and its amazing profitability and efficiencies.
Government shouldn't be based on profitability, it should be based on services and outcomes. Adding all these stupid expectations dilutes the entire point of the endeavour.
For example, see people's obsession with Transit rates. Just make it free and extract the costs fairly across taxation brackets because even those who don't use it still benefit from the infrastructure it brings (for example, if you drive and someone transits, thats one less car on the road for you). But obsessing that public transit needs to run like a business is absurd because profit in this case doesn't actually provide any economic benefit as an incentive model.
Silicon valley in general seems to think everything should be a computer, or at least as efficient as one.
Cities are incredibly complicated things that no central planner can ever fully understand. There are layers upon layers, all interacting with each other, and all changing constantly.
Only a silicon valley programmer, blinded by hubris, would assume they can "optimize" a city, as if their unique ability to program computers enables them to analyze and improve incredibly complex social structures. They will fail.
Hubris with regards to urban planning is hardly unique to programmers. Planning boards and transit authorities and city councils and everyone who's got opinions on those things is intervening, and sometimes messing things up. Cities are not in some romantic state-of-nature where everything is organic and bottom-up and intervening risks destroying the ecology.
Between fatalism and high modernism, there's room to actually improve things on the margins, check to see how it's going, and iterate.
Completely agree that hubris in this area isn't unique to programmers. I'm an architect, and plenty of architects have developed some truly idiotic ideas for ideal cities. Corbusier's plan for Paris was to level it and replace it with skyscrapers.
What bugs me is that the programmers of today seem to think they can optimize everything. Not only are they incapable, they're simply unqualified. At least professional urban planners have studied the topic in depth. Google throwing an engineering team at cities is just ridiculous. Might as well poll dentists on the best way to build software.
I think you've articulated your point quite succinctly.
> Might as well poll dentists on the best way to build software.
A programmer with hubris would take VC money to "make better dental software" never having met a dentist or having done any dental work, perhaps only ever taken a scant look over at the monitor and deciding it's not fast enough or whatever. Then they'd build an MVP, try and sell it to some clinics, and upon being laughed out the door, would take more VC money to try and reinvent dentistry because their parents never told them "no"
Plenty of leaders in charge of SWEs will screw up software by itself, let alone a city. Usually because they fail to realize that software mirrors the org chart (Conway's Law).
A SWE shouldn't even think of software as simple. "Layers upon layers, all interacting with each other, and all changing constantly" describes any software org. And I can't even imagine running a city.
To take the metaphor further, it's like this except the software is hosted on GitHub and open to public commits with limited moderation. It grows and changes on its own without anybody really knowing what's happening in total. (Here your metaphor needs no expansion)
Biology is possibly even messier and less like a computer. For that matter, biology isn't even really machine-like, only pseudo-like in some ways. But some will rebut that the universe and everything is doing computation, as if it's meaningful to consider a rock or a dandelion to be a computer.
What's missing in this conversation is the notion of "computational complexity".
For practical purposes, everything can be modeled as a computer. But some things are impractically complex.
What's interesting is that modern computer software, and to some extent computer hardware (even after assuming perfect digital abstraction at the transistor level), is itself becoming impractically complex!
Only a silicon valley programmer... and virtually every modern(ist) government in the past 150+ years?
Attempting and failing to centrally control cities has been a recurring motif for ages. I'd love to say it's changing, and maybe it is, but not nearly as much as it should.
Yes definitely. But the fields of planning and architecture have learned lessons from those mistakes. These engineers, being fundamentally ignorant of their subject matter, are guaranteed to replicate the errors of the past. They're simply not qualified to do the job they're trying to do.
Pretty surprised to see this kind of remark on Hackernews, which is usually pretty much /r/fuckcars 2 in terms of how people view city planning.
But yeah, we can just barely even program a computer. Planning a city to a high degree of granularity is out of the question. Best we can do is apply constraints, observe the results, and iterate.
This talks about a lot of problems, but I have a hard time gleaning any wisdom from it aside from "Computers bad, tech companies like money".
If the epistemology they're using isn't good, I don't see any real suggestion on what we should be using. What can we learn from the fields of Media Studies and Art History that can help us make better city planning decisions?
It also commits the sin of criticizing some nebulous other, an unclear amorphous cloud of tech-bros, capitalism, and other symbols for things people just don't like. Is the app that tells me if the bus is running late not an example or these connected cities? Traffic lights that adapt to traffic flows? Are we not building a smart city with every connected bus, every car-detecting traffic light, every pedestrian crossing with a button?
This article doesn't clearly point at a problem, or clearly impart any lessons that I can learn. It just vaguely points in the direction of companies and people the author doesn't like.
We are software engineers, and we proudly believe that every problem is a nail to our hammer, all meaningful knowledge is but a slight variation of the computer science concepts we've already mastered.
This is what happens with the obliteration of true philosophy and the rise of intellectual philistinism. The sciences fragment into parochial principalities, and without recourse to genuine metaphysics, they elect some preferred field to take its place, making a metaphysics out of its method. In the physical sciences, physics is elected to that position. Mind you, neither physics as a science, nor any of the sciences as such, necessitate this, but scientists, like anybody else, cannot function without an arche or orienting first principles, and in our culture, materialistic metaphysics is insinuated into the background intuition.
