In a guest post on the Meeting of the Minds, UrbanFootprint founder Peter Calthorpe describes the cognitive city and how cities are like bodies:
For a long time, cities have been likened to bodies. Circulation, metabolism, organs, digestion, all have neat parallels. But can a city think? Cognitive functions follow a sequence; raw perception, filtering information, identifying threats and desires, imagining alternate actions, speculating on potential outcomes and mobilizing for action. In the age of big data and cloud computing, the city can become conscious in exactly these ways.
In the article, Peter expands on this idea and reflects on how UrbanFootprint can be used by cities to mimic the stages of human cognition by sifting through cities massive data sets, helping explore possible futures, analyzing those futures across a range of concerns, and helping organize results for socialization and discussion.
The full article is available on the Meeting of the Minds blog.
