This comment has turned out to be rather long. I'd be really interested to hear what other people thought about A City Is Not a Computer. Especially you Mel!
I thought that this was a good article. It's well written and well researched. The middle section that covers the history of cities' evolution is great.
However, and there always has to be a however it seems, there were a few things that grated on me.
The argument part---rather than the history part---hinges on this assertion:
Urban intelligence is more than information processing.
And this bugs me. It rests on an essentialist argument that most often comes up in discussions about the nature of consciousness. This is going to be a bit tricky as it relies on you, dear reader, taking a stance. If you take one position then you should find Mattern's position unproblematic. If you take the other, as I do, then you might share my concern.
We* don't really understand consciousness. In our attempts to explain it there are two main camps.
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One side claims that physics explains all phenomena in the universe. Because we don't think that there is a major part of physics that we're missing, when we are presented with a system made of matter (atoms and that kind of stuff) we ought to be able to understand it. Of course, most systems are too big and complex to explain in their totality, but they could be explained if there was enough time and computing power to do so.
This camp's argument goes like this: Because brains are made of matter. As hard as we look we can't find any magic part that contains a soul or a homunculus. This must mean that physics can explain the brain's behaviour, we just don't have enough data and compute power to do so. Perhaps it is impossible to do so in the finite time that the universe will exist for, but given infinite time it would be possible.
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The other side claims that our knowledge of the universe is flawed (actually both sides would concede this) and that our current understanding of physics doesn't provide a good enough explanation to allow for consciousness to emerge from atoms doing their thing. There must be something more.
There isn't a way to decide on who is right without a time machine. It's similar to a religious view in that one must have faith without evidence.
I'm in the first camp, the materialists, and I don't see it as a faith issue. I think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. As such, the absence of any phenomenon being explained by something that we might call 'magical' is evidence that future phenomena won't be either.
The reason I took that detour is because cities are complex systems, at least as complex as brains. If we think of people and trees and cars and buildings as the city's neurons, then their interaction produces a kind of computation output, much like a brain.
You might counter me here and say "the brain is not a computer", but that is coloured by the way that the definition changed over the 20th century. At the beginning---and into the middle---of the 20th c a computer was a person, usually female, who computed the answers to well understood equations. For a bit of insight to this, go and see Hidden Figures, it's excellent.
What we usually mean when we say "computer" is an electronic device that follows the Von Neumann architecture pattern. I.e. the device that you are reading this on right now.
I'd like you to think of a computer as any system that does information processing. Therefore your brain is a computer, a water clock is a computer, and yes, a city is a computer.
If we can agree that a city is a computer, but maybe not in the narrow definition that we usually would use, then lets take on my next assertion.
It's not digital information, but it does store meaning. Mattern mentions:
the “nonsemantic information” inherent in shadows, wind, rust, in the signs of wear on a well-trodden staircase, the creaks of a battered bridge
and that's all information. The city's components are influencing each other constantly. Not to introduce too many computing concepts, but the great insight of the Turing Machine was that there needn't be a separation between instructions and data. Any given memory location in the Turing machine, or any given cubic nanometre of the city can contain either data or instructions, depending on the state of the system. To put this in a less confusing way, when you walk your shoe influences the ground by eroding it a bit, and your shoe gets eroded in the process; this ramifies out to affect the wearer, other humans, animals, other paving stones...
If every element/occupant of a city is processing and storing information, all the time then I don't see how the city can be seen as not doing information processing.
It could be that Mattern knows this and is trying to just draw a crowd, but it feels to me that she is trying to make an essentialist argument that the city has magical properties that are other than what can be explained by physics.
This makes me sad. I get a great aesthetic sensation of beauty from considering how such simple interactions can aggregate to produce a thing of such amazing complexity. That is diminished by saying that there is a magical layer that holds it all together; much like knowing that the amazing flying acrobat is actually being held up with invisible wires.
Information processing the the base, the the foundation that everything sits upon. It is not separate from things like civic pride and a sense of belonging, those things emerge from the information processing.
*everyone in the world!
P.s. I haven't addressed the other issue I have with this piece, which is probably more important (Taking a technology approach to city planning) because I wanted to focus specifically on this issue. I might if I get bored later.