Inventing Future Cities

Batty describes cities as organism-like systems that grow out of countless individual and collective decisions rather than from any plan, which is why no set of economic or mechanical laws can forecast them. The book concentrates on the processes that produce change rather than on physical form: the way function is coming apart from built form as information networks reshape daily life, the clustering of cities into connected systems, what a city run on real-time data would be like, and the repeated waves of technology that keep disrupting and renewing urban life.

Read it as a caution and a brief. A twin of a city is not a prediction machine; it is a way of exploring what could be invented. Batty is explicit about the limits of forecasting in complex systems, which is the right frame for a model whose users will want it to tell them the future.

Cover via Open Library.