Inventing Future Cities

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.