ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the creation of the so-called 'real-time city' is changing our understanding of cities and creating new scientific approaches to urban studies. It provides a full overview of the possible implications of the datafication of urban life in the constitution of urban culture. At least three different ways of understanding the city through urban data have emerged. The first can be understood as a new 'action oriented epistemology' of the city. A second approach has a more critical and often also an ontological orientation and seeks to understand the production and experience of urban space mediated by computation. The third approach has focused on normative theories of urban culture at large. The main argument to be made here is that cities are different from other complex systems such as galaxies or rainforests, in that they are social-cultural-political systems that can be framed and evaluated normatively.
