From the City as a Service to The City as a License / Martijn de Waal and Frank Suurenbroek for the Shenzhen Biennale (UABB) 2019

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What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," Archdaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at the Biennial to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies – and Artificial Intelligence in particular – might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, the Politecnico di Torino and SCUT.

Cities, as Goethe had already pointed out, should be understood as continuously developing 'forms in motion' (see Batty 2018). In the past, technological developments and our hopeful, as well as our dystopian imaginations of them, have been one of the main sources of kinetic energy to kick-off the shapeshifting processes of urban transformations. Most of the time with unexpected side-effects, evolving center stage in retrospect.

With the notion of 'eyes of the city' the curators of the 2019 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture and Shenzhen point to a new set of technologies that are rapidly being developed and deployed in urban life. Initially, this metaphor refers to the technologies that actually 'see' urban life: the camera's, sensors and online tracking technologies that measure everything: from air quality and pedestrian density to the movement of cars or the sentiments about certain places expressed on social networks.