Cities are facing enormous changes due to the digital revolution. Information networks and flows influence significantly the way cities are used, our ability to analyze them, and the ways of organizing planning and decision-making processes. The digital city is increasingly dominating the physical city, affecting the emergence and expansion of social networks, (re)defining how public space is used and changing our capability to navigate in the urban maze.
Meanwhile, the technological revolution is providing us with expanding capacity to trace, compare, and reflect on citizens’ activities. New devices and applications enable both professionals and lay people to capture, share, and create information, enriching and expanding our understanding of the city.
Furthermore, the digitalization of cities provides us with opportunities to reorganize planning processes to enable bottom-up processes. Where open source, ‘wiki-planning’ and serious gaming meet with guerilla urbanism and top-down “smart cities” concepts, new governance landscapes may evolve. Cities respond ever faster to this emerging new information, innovations, and their physical and institutional impact. Consequently, feedback loops in the city evolution are shortened and we are compelled to constantly review our understanding of it.
Complex theories offer a source of inspiration for enhancing our understanding of the digitalization of cities and its effects. Complexity theories assume that systems constantly transform bottom-up in response to their dynamic environment, producing continuous evolution as a result of alternation of non-linear, chaotic and linear, steady states, making the system extremely hard to predict. Along with the emerging digitalization of cities, we appear to be approaching a less predictable state – more information is produced than we can process, and it interacts in a horizontal rather than a hierarchical way, producing unexpected, disproportionate outcomes. This expanding complexity of cities, uncertainty, and imperfect knowledge makes the call for complexity inspired planning approaches even more topical: methods for steering are nonetheless necessary in the city. Complexity theories of cities offer concepts and ideas to enhance our understanding of digital/spatial cities.
