Are Cities Intelligent?

Not about "Smart Cities", which are neither smart nor cities.

A city cannot think, can it? Yet it acts to create loyalty among its residents,  often manifested in sports teams to name a prominent example.

Jerry Seinfeld’s routine “Rooting for Clothes” illustrates this:

“Loyalty to one sports team is pretty hard to justify. The players are always changing or moving to another city. You are actually rooting for the clothes. You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt, and they hate him now! Boo! Different shirt! BOOOO!”

People, boosters, identify so much with their city, they act on its behalf. Does that make the city itself self-aware? Is a bee hive or an ant hill? Who knows? These are not a traditional biological organism, yet it can manipulate people (bees, ants) into behaving in the aggregate self-interest. Cities in particular acquire the middle-man status in the multi-sided markets between residents and jobs and residents and vendors, and so acts in service to the social project of ensuring group loyalty, and using it to promote its own ends.

The city establishes place-based institutions (sports teams, though sometimes those are flighty), news media, department stores and other local businesses, as well as governments and non-profit organisations that depend on reinforcing loyalty to the place and attracting new members.

One could argue that the idea of the city is a meme, and of course each city has its own memes, that invade people’s minds and co-opt their behaviour to serve its ends.  The meme itself is not conscious, we suppose.

I don’t think it’s a meaningful question. One doesn’t have to be self-aware to be intelligent.

Intelligent: The ability learn, understand, make judgements based on reason.

If we are willing to ascribe intelligence to individual brains, which are just comprised of neurons and the like, why the collection of brains would not also be intelligent is unclear.

And then there is the question of “What is reason?” Most actions are intuitive, not strategically thought through. When I speak I don’t even know what will come out of my mouth exactly before it is said. So while my mind might be trained, and the words are coherent, they are not “reasoned” in the same way we would work through a math problem. Even the first draft of writing is coming out of my fingertips before it is carefully mulled in the brain (the advantage of word processors and the ability to easily edit). That doesn’t make it unintelligent. These are patterns that have been reinforced. Many animals have successful skills that are inherited, that have been learned genetically over generations. They are not unintelligent in deciding what to do, but they are not reasoning in the way we normally use the term. They may learn from trial and error, like the crows that use cars to smash nuts, and imitation.

Cities also act collectively, building things or destroying them, maintaining or eroding, allocating resources here or there. Many of those decisions were informed by analysis from planners or engineers or economists, but the decisions were made by politicians and developers in a far less reasoned, and more intuitive way. Those decisions have consequences, which then inform the city (as does the experience of watching other cities make decisions which have other outcomes). How is that not intelligence?

Societies, clubs, corporations, universities, religions and other institutions also learn and make judgements over time, codifying practices into laws, rules, and traditions, and those that survive are often very long lived. Cities are a particular type of place-based society. They demonstrate a collective intelligence, albeit in a unique, non-biological way.

Who is to say what cities or other institutions understand when we don’t know what we as people actually understand?¹

Some Dall-E Nonsense image for the algorithm