From 30,000 feet, you could be forgiven for thinking that a city has a pulse. On camera, time-lapse photography of the morning in-rush of traffic, followed by the evening exodus, looks like a beating heart. The road networks in and out of cities create constant streams of cars—they are the veins that transfer cars out to its extremities. Zoom out even further, and footage taken over a longer period reveals how the city grows as its borders expand. Its power network simulates the electrical pulses that race around a nervous system.
The further you zoom out, the more closely a city starts to resemble a living organism. But if our cities are living organisms, they are still pretty basic forms of life. They have no brain, and in most cases, no cognitive feedback loop as to what is happening around their organs (regions). It’s ironic that our most sophisticated form of living, the urban conglomeration, is also the dumbest.
But is all of this about to change? The internet of things, sensors embedded in "intelligent" infrastructure and autonomous vehicles, holds promise of radical progress for the future of our cities. Is the birth of the smart city going to take this amoeba-like organism, struggling for survival at the bottom of a primordial lake, and move it into a sophisticated life form? If our cities are about to evolve from something that simply survives, into a thinking, feeling entity that can self-regulate and self-modulate, we need to ask, what characteristics should these smart city "beings" have? What sort of intelligence do we want them to have; and what are the benefits of that? How will we ensure that the best characteristics will establish and grow and the others will be eliminated? These are critical questions.
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