ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors trace the long history of this latter ambition to develop an applied science of cities, from the very birth of urban planning in the late 19th century to the “smart city” initiatives of today. They focus on two prior moments of enthusiasm for quantitative methods in urban planning: one at the turn of the 20th century, and the second in the decades immediately following the Second World War. In the long history of the “smart city”, the decades following the Second World War represent a second key moment, one marked by various attempts to apply cybernetics and systems theory to urban planning. The early smart city initiatives of 2009 and 2010 placed much more emphasis on computational methods and traditional modes of data analysis; “big data” from the social world is more a product of the ubiquity of the smart phone, and thus should be dated to slightly after the dawn of the smart city.
