It’s also worth reading the comments, particularly those from Enrique Ramirez and Fred Scharmen, as they (and Greenfield in response) address some of the obvious questions about the limitations (cities past and present do not lack for interested parties and engaged actors who aim to manipulate constituent parts and bureaucracies to their advantage) and potential exclusivity of such developments.

Gregory Weissner’s introduction indicates that the show is “intended to bring architects and urban designers into a conversation that until now has been limited largely to technologists.” He continues:

“Don’t be confused by the technology (and the terminology), though. What we are talking about is nothing short of a complete reorientation of our relationship to the built environment and the unintended consequences are not going to be all positive. Either architects and urban designers insert themselves now into the discussion about how these technologies are conceptualized and deployed or they risk diminishing the unique contributions they bring to shaping our world.”

Architecture and urban design should be in this debate, no doubt, but its entire practice, sensibility and economic model may need redressing (as with many other fields, of course.) Given their previous predilections, the lack of technical and conceptual understanding – never mind an apparently congenital inability to design a decent website – the profession has a long way to go before it can demand a seat at the table. An admittedly fading tradition of thinking of itself as the ‘master builder’ needs to be entirely excoriated once and for all. Devising the architect’s new sensibility – what Paul Dourish would describe as “the designer’s stance” for the discipline – will also be fundamentally important. Either way, complex urban systems are well beyond the ken of the sole master builder; they have been for years, but increasingly so with this ever more multi-layered understanding of the city.

Other design disciplines – interaction design, industrial design, service design, to name three – are currently far better placed to lead on these ideas, within multidisciplinary design teams. So the architect may be best-placed as part of that team, leading on spatial intelligence just as others might lead on information and communication systems, materials, structures, embodied interaction, behavioural psychology, topography, acoustics, biodiversity and so on. In a recent conversation with the SENSEable City Lab’s Carlo Ratti, we ended up sketching out a loosely multidisciplinary team in which the architect was one of perhaps ten different disciplines, all of whom would lead at various points.

Which reinforces my impression that the architect’s role in future design conversations will have less to do with a particular kind of technical expertise (as Hill points out, architects are way behind technologists in developing the technical expertise necessary to design for a sentient city) and more to do with a peculiar way of thinking (or kind of intelligence).  Doesn’t do much to explain why the “spatial intelligence” architects provide is particularly useful or important, but when architects are conversing with themselves, that’s probably less important than pointing out disciplinary deficiencies.