---
id: media/inventing-future-cities
about:
  label: Inventing Future Cities
  description: >-
    Michael Batty's 2018 book on why the future of cities can be invented but
    not predicted.
  tags:
    - cities
    - prediction
    - complexity
    - planning
    - data
  depiction: cover.jpg
book:
  authors:
    - Michael Batty
  publisher: MIT Press
  year: 2018
  isbn: '9780262038959'
  url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20186750W'
domains:
  - places
relations:
  - predicate: made_by
    target: people/michael-batty
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Inventing Future Cities - Michael Batty - Google Books
      url: 'https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9780262038959'
    - title: 'Open Library: Inventing Future Cities'
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20186750W'
  created: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
[Batty](/people/michael-batty/) describes cities as organism-like systems that grow out of countless individual and collective decisions, not from any plan. He argues that no set of economic or mechanical laws can forecast cities.

The book is about the processes that produce change more than about physical form. It covers:

- function 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
- the repeated waves of technology that disrupt and renew urban life

Batty is explicit about the limits of forecasting in complex systems. Users of a city twin will want it to tell them the future. A city twin is a way of exploring what could be invented; it is not a prediction machine.

Cover via Open Library.