Big data, smart systems, machine learning – it is inevitable that these new technologies will change the way we study, build and manage our cities. At the same time resurgent interest in consensus and contributive action seems to oppose an exclusively data-driven urbanism. Is the opposition of machine intelligence and democracy inevitable, or are shared trajectories possible?
Politicians, social scientists, urbanists, and architects find their working methods and disciplinary knowledge challenged by insights derived from big data, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). As both citizens and experts in the many respective fields, our mission must be to bring in our disciplinary knowledge and civic engagement to support the appropriate development and discussion of data-driven tools, to consider both their biases and potentials, and to promote broader social literacy and criticality. Ultimately, it is a question of both decanting the technical quality of these new instruments of design, management and decision making, as well as enhancing democratic control over them. How do we do this? Do our disciplines currently lack adequate strategies to understand, let alone critique or exploit the knowledge-products of machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data?
In 2019, ALICE and LDM, two laboratories at EPFL, were awarded with the Latsis Symposium grant to organize a scientific conference around the challenges posed by digitalisation to the different disciplines and actors involved in the creation of the contemporary city. Due to the ongoing covid-19 crisis, the International DEEP CITY International Latsis Symposium was rescheduled to March 2021 (24th-26th) with an innovative conference concept where the digital and the physical joined to create a global dialogical field. Streaming from the Rolex Learning Center at the EPFL Campus in Lausanne, the Deep City had parallel and common activities in two partner sites: Singapore (in collaboration with SUTD Singapore University of Technology and Design) and Hong Kong (in collaboration with The University of Hong Kong).