Smart Cities

4New Sciences of Cities

Unlike medieval cities, which constituted an archetype of an integrated system, the cities of the 20th Century gradually structured themselves around single functions. The pollution resulting from industrialization brought on a disassociation between habitat functions and production functions. In addition, and more importantly, the post-war reconstruction era saw the emergence of “machines for living in”, which were unifunctional and separate from industrial areas: the “machines for making”. In order to leave this unhealthy type of urbanism, we must return to an urbanism which strives to have life in the city in all of its components and which does not only optimize a few parameters, and not just those of promoters.

Succeeding in this integration of a city’s dimensions requires an understanding of how a city lives and evolves, and then an ability to model these dynamics. Research surrounding urban dynamics is old and dates back to Lewis Mumford, but it has recently experienced resurgence with the sciences of cities, including the works of Michael Batty, The New Science of Cities [BAT 13], which is an attempt to integrate all components of a city’s simulation and define the roles of its actors. Lewis Mumford, Patrick Geddes and Jane Jacobs were the first and harshest critics of the “oil-slick” urbanism of American cities, which resulted in the formation of urban conurbations, a notion coined by Patrick Geddes to refer to urbanized zones outside of a historical ...