9 ms·

A City Is Not a Computer (2017)

43 points by conanxin 2y ago

tivert 2y ago
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.
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  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.
  - airstrike 2y ago
    I look forward to your blog post on this showing up on HN (seriously)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
idontknowtech 2y ago
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.
- goatlover 2y ago
  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.
  - lupire 2y ago
    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!
- tikhonj 2y ago
  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.
  - idontknowtech 2y ago
    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.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  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.
  - 2y ago
ctrw 2y ago
[flagged]
imzadi 2y ago
Similarly, a government is not a business.
- gremlinunderway 2y ago
  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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
somnic 2y ago
>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.
- gremlinunderway 2y ago
  > 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.
  - somnic 2y ago
    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.
farhanhubble 2y ago
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.
traverseda 2y ago
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.
_m_p 2y ago
Same author wrote a really incredible article about, in part, ice core libraries: https://placesjournal.org/article/the-big-data-of-ice-rocks-soils-and-sediments/ https://placesjournal.org/article/the-big-data-of-ice-rocks-...
082349872349872 2y ago
(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 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)
- Zambyte 2y ago
  Software self-organizes as much as cities do.
  - hermitdev 2y ago
    Nah, waves of gentrification are just bubble sort in action... j/k
  - goatlover 2y ago
    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?
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Good point; what I had been trying to say is that software (and especially hardware) is architected, but architecting cities usually leads to problems.
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  > 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.
brudgers 2y ago
Related, A City is not a Tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_Is_Not_a_Tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_Is_Not_a_Tree 1965 essay: https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/i103su12/files/2011/07/1965-City-is-not-a-Tree-Alexander.pdf https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/i103su12/files/2011/07/19...
- awaythrow999 2y ago
  Not just related. It __is__ the essay. This is like rewriting No Silver Bullet without giving credit to Brooks.
  - lupire 2y ago
    "Not a tree" is a more specific argument about connectivity than the OP article. It's certainly related.
  - thadk 2y ago
    Indeed, the first three words in the book version of this essay are credit to Christopher Alexander's original.
  - JoeJonathan 2y ago
    The book very explicitly gives credit to the essay, so much so that Mattern frames the argument in relation to the earlier essay.
- ysofunny 2y ago
  but how about a forest?
- jboynyc 2y ago
  Also: “A City is Not a Semilattice Either” https://doi.org/10.1068/a080375 https://doi.org/10.1068/a080375
  - samatman 2y ago
    Usable link https://kylewoodward.com/blog-data/pdfs/references/harary+rockey-environment-and-planning-a-1976A.pdf https://kylewoodward.com/blog-data/pdfs/references/harary+ro...

43 points by conanxin 2y ago

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.

lo_zamoyski 2y ago
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.
- airstrike 2y ago
  I look forward to your blog post on this showing up on HN (seriously)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

idontknowtech 2y ago

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.

goatlover 2y ago
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.
- lupire 2y ago
  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!
tikhonj 2y ago
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.
- idontknowtech 2y ago
  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.
hot_gril 2y ago
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.
- 2y ago

ctrw 2y ago

[flagged]

imzadi 2y ago

Similarly, a government is not a business.

gremlinunderway 2y ago
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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

somnic 2y ago

>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.

gremlinunderway 2y ago
> 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.
- somnic 2y ago
  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.

farhanhubble 2y ago

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.

traverseda 2y ago

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.

_m_p 2y ago

Same author wrote a really incredible article about, in part, ice core libraries: https://placesjournal.org/article/the-big-data-of-ice-rocks-soils-and-sediments/ https://placesjournal.org/article/the-big-data-of-ice-rocks-...

082349872349872 2y ago

(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 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)

Zambyte 2y ago
Software self-organizes as much as cities do.
- hermitdev 2y ago
  Nah, waves of gentrification are just bubble sort in action... j/k
- goatlover 2y ago
  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?
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Good point; what I had been trying to say is that software (and especially hardware) is architected, but architecting cities usually leads to problems.
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
> 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.

brudgers 2y ago

Related, A City is not a Tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_Is_Not_a_Tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_Is_Not_a_Tree 1965 essay: https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/i103su12/files/2011/07/1965-City-is-not-a-Tree-Alexander.pdf https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/i103su12/files/2011/07/19...

awaythrow999 2y ago
Not just related. It __is__ the essay. This is like rewriting No Silver Bullet without giving credit to Brooks.
- lupire 2y ago
  "Not a tree" is a more specific argument about connectivity than the OP article. It's certainly related.
- thadk 2y ago
  Indeed, the first three words in the book version of this essay are credit to Christopher Alexander's original.
- JoeJonathan 2y ago
  The book very explicitly gives credit to the essay, so much so that Mattern frames the argument in relation to the earlier essay.
ysofunny 2y ago
but how about a forest?
jboynyc 2y ago
Also: “A City is Not a Semilattice Either” https://doi.org/10.1068/a080375 https://doi.org/10.1068/a080375
- samatman 2y ago
  Usable link https://kylewoodward.com/blog-data/pdfs/references/harary+rockey-environment-and-planning-a-1976A.pdf https://kylewoodward.com/blog-data/pdfs/references/harary+ro...