Although the approach of this project seems to be driven quite a
lot by a cultural engineering mindset, there are some
interesting people-focused elements in it: In the past decades,
real time control systems have been developed in a variety of
engineering applications. In so doing, they have dramatically
increased the efficiency of systems through energy savings,
regulation of the dynamics, increased robustness and disturbance
tolerance. Now: can you have a city that performs as a real time
control system? This is the aim of the WikiCity project at MIT.
Let’s examine the four key components of a real time control
system: - entity to be controlled in an environment
characterised by uncertainty; - sensors able to acquire
information about the entity’s state in real-time; -
intelligence capable of evaluating system performance against
desired outcomes; - physical actuators able to act upon the
system to realise the control strategy. A city certainly fits
the definition of point 1, and point 2 does not seem to p