By: Zeynep Ugur
Part of State of Responsible Tech 2025, Generative Things
Ugur, Z. (2025). Urban Emergence through Data: promise or paradox?. In RIOT 2025, State of Responsible Tech – Generative Things (pp. 42-48). Stichting ThingsCon Amsterdam
https://thingscon.org/publications/riot-2025/riot-2025-urban-emergence-through-data-promise-or-paradox/
Abstact (generated):
This essay critically interrogates the growing discourse around data-enabled urban self-organization, contrasting the techno-optimistic promise of generative AI with long-standing, pre-digital traditions of communal governance. Drawing from urban theory, complexity science, and historical anthropology, Uğur reframes “urban emergence” as an inherent quality of cities shaped by relational interactions and decentralized decision-making—predating digital infrastructures by millennia. The paper traces historical examples from Çatalhöyük to Igbo-Ukwu to illustrate how egalitarian and participatory urban systems have functioned without centralized control or predictive technologies. Juxtaposing this lineage with contemporary “smart city” rhetoric, Uğur argues that data infrastructures, while claiming to enable flexibility and responsiveness, often reassert control and rational predictability under market logics. The paper critiques the paradox of designing for self-organization through inherently mistrustful, extractive, and reductive technologies. Instead, it calls for an epistemic shift: recognizing emergence as a creative, uncertain, and relational process, and urban intelligence as grounded not in computation, but in human trust, ritual, and lived complexity. This work contributes a nuanced lens to digital urbanism by resisting data determinism and foregrounding plural, situated forms of urban knowledge.