Smart cities: Distributed intelligence or central planning?

Abstract

We discuss various aspects of the application of AI/IT to cities, based on Portugali’s concept of self-organizing cities, Haken’s Synergetics as theory of self-organizing complex systems, and in particular on the Haken and Portugali study of the interplay between Shannon information and pragmatic/semantic information in cognition. In terms of allometry, it is shown that increasing automatization of a city may lead even to an increase of load on humans and in extreme cases to a system’s instability.