3.1.1. Architect-less cities?

These cities were built without architects, but residents had a shared vision of what beauty is, which meant that each of them was responsible for integrating their lot into an overall harmonious system. There were no building permits because no one would have ever dreamt of building something ugly in a harmonious balance. As Mumford explains, “The consensus surrounding the goals of urban life was so entrenched that any variation would only serve to reinforce the model”. This highlights the contrast between baroque formalism – an illusion of order following the Middle Ages – and the asymmetries and irregularities of the cities of the Middle Ages, which “take into account the most subtlety thought-out necessity for practical order and aesthetic imperatives”.

It was the Italian, French, and Hanseatic merchant towns, as well as Novgorod the Great (Veliki Novgorod) and Pskov in Russia, that had certain liberties based on direct democracy [SIN 11]. Until the sacking and subjection of Novgorod in 1478 by Tsar Ivan III, the city was ruled by a relatively pure form of the popular Republic. We see this today in the landsgemeinde of Swiss-German regions; the veche (вече), where anyone who rung the bell could call an assembly to deliberate on a subject. Princes who called the veche were bound by convention to the city and responsible for the people who could end their reign, which is what happened in 1136 when the Novgorodians chased out their prince. A sense of the common good and a global aesthetic linked to democratic deliberation meant that problems stemming from urban medieval organization (guilds, traffic, interfaces between cities and their outskirts, religious life and civic life) were easily solved. “Veche is certainly the most essential notion in Russian culture”, explains Olga Sevatyanova in a wonderful book on Novgorod [FRI 15]. All decisions were made through a consensus, and this became the reference for the liberal reforms of the 19th Century, after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and zemstvos were established to autonomously manage lands at a local level.

A city was a learning experience, a permanent collective process for solving problems that contributed to a shared cultural and methodological baggage. This system was not a projection of an ideal city – something we will find in many later works from Thomas More’s Utopia, to the garden cities of Ebenezer Howard and the new technological utopia of smart cities – but of the profound conscience that a city was a system in constant imbalance, perpetually under threat from the struggle between the many and the few and – at times when the few subjugated the many – by fratricidal struggles of the powerful against one another.

Cities are a space for conflict resolution, whether they be social or political conflicts, or violence endogenous to the urban fabric, or the violence imported by the insecurity of the countryside. This is how a civic religion develops, that of the common good; a middle ground between ancient virtue and the expectancies of urban government, which the Christian Aristotelian Marsilius of Padua synthesized in his thesis De Defensor Pacis, and to which Ambroggio Lorenzetti makes an allegorical reference in his mural Allegory of Good Government that decorates the City Hall in Siena (Figure 3.2). The link between the institutional organization of the struggle between classes and the pursuit of common good is at the core of Machiavelli’s famous 16th Century book.

As time went on, this civic religion gave us the Palazzo municipale and its Piazza civile, which is one of the rare buildings to be subjected to a detailed plan as the physical incarnation of the political architecture of the city.

Without realizing it, this systemic dynamic dealt with one of the most arduous problems we face today when modeling cities as complex systems: The limits of a city and its interaction with the surrounding countryside. These limits were once represented by the walls around a city, initially built for security purposes, but which also had an essential political and functional role. These walls created a sense of community and managed the interactions between a city’s economic activities and those of its surrounding areas. This is where German economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen came up with his early 19th Century location theory, which explains that economic activities such as extensive agriculture and industry are distributed concentrically in circles. Activities that provided increasing returns were at the center, surrounded by activities with more and more diminishing returns the further out of the city you go.

The desirability of an area can therefore be seen as a system of interdependencies structured by synergies created by the city center. Von Thünen’s industrial location theory [THÜ 42] accounted for the desire of Renaissance economists to build a general system of interdependencies for economic activities structured around cities, a vision that modern economics would abandon in favor of Ricardo’s theories². A monotown with a single activity creates very few synergies and therefore causes the territory to lose its appeal.

3.1.2. How do cities become unintelligent?

Looking at medieval cities also shows us why such a model failed. Mumford explains that “the walls created a sense of exclusive insularity which, in the end, proved to be fatal”. The dynamic of a system is its ability to redefine its boundaries when the environment changes. If medieval cities provided a good example of a network of medium cities each representing a “Thünen zone”, they were isolated by poor roads and insecurity. With the revolution of transportation – the “death of distance” – this urban dynamic disappeared in favor of monofunctional cities.

One conjunctural element of great magnitude was to hit this urban dynamic: the bubonic plague of 1348 which wiped out a third of Europe’s population and roughly half of the population of the cities. As the epidemic affected groups organized around regular contact, communal institutions were hit hard. The clergy and monastic orders were particularly affected, and they represented the backbone of intellectual development and were harboring the blossoming bud of Renaissance political thinking. What followed was superstition and a relationship with power bereft of principles.

The Great Plague contributed to two parallel political developments which shaped the urban dynamic of cities: the rise of absolutism saw cities as a symbol of power, favoring baroque centralized planning to organic planning, as was the case in Saint Petersburg, built by modernist Tsar Peter the Great. A beautiful city that integrated foreign contributions to Russian culture, Saint Petersburg was built by thousands of serfs, many of whom died in the awful working conditions. The city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural is the exact opposite of Veliki Novgorod, which grew organically. It was founded in 1723 and began as a giant factory. Its founder, Vasily Tatischev, associated this urban approach with a political ideal: autocracy. The apparent mess of an organic city disappears in favor of geometric rigor, a city is no longer an expression of a system of life, of bottom-up organic growth, but of a top-down authoritarian order that represents the power of its prince.

The old regime of collective liberties then moved towards the individual liberties of capitalism, which contributed to the loss of a vision that considered a city as a cohesive whole in favor of the optimization of a single parameter – such as land value – towards a singular objective: short-term financial profit.

The city loses its intelligence first through the submission of its development and its plan to the visions of political power, which expects a strict order; tidy plans that split from the apparent disorder of medieval cities that represented a human experience of the city. “Life becomes an instrument of order”, as Lewis Mumford puts it. The “death of distance” means that cities can finally scale the walls they had built. Cities begin to develop beyond their walls, losing their coherence in the process.

With the development of industry starting in the early 19th Century, they lose their coherence: “From then on, construction works depended on the initiatives of bankers, industrialists or inventors of new technologies” explains Lewis Mumford. The sense of the common good disappears with the affirmation of the myth of individual liberties: “anyone and everyone was looking to become a despot in his own kingdom” [MUM 11]. There have been no improvements to urban life with industrialization. On the contrary, any study concerning the quality of life in society – which, contrary to a certain popular misconception, was a very important factor for classic economists such as Adam Smith – disappears in favor of a frantic pursuit of progress, with little to no ethical considerations. It is the birth of Coketown, a representation of Manchester from Charles Dickens’ book Hard Times (1854), which expresses the full horror of a stunted city, sacrificed in the sole name of industry, polluted and dirty. “Until 1838, neither Manchester nor Birmingham even functioned politically as incorporated boroughs: they were man-heaps, machine-warrens, not organs of human association”.

While medieval cities were filled with Renaissance humanism and political philosophy and articulated around a social and political life, making them places of emancipation and liberty – as goes the German proverb, “city air makes you free” – the Coketown era is that of the materialism predominant in Western politics, in which only increasing utility can improve peoples’ lives. The middle class that owned the factories was convinced of its righteousness thanks to liberal theories (Manchesterism³) and the apology of the industrial city, which appears as modern and clean in comparison to ancient artisanal activities – like tanneries – generating stench and pollution. It was the era of Saint-Simon, who saw in the industry the means for humanity’s transformation. The English chemist Andrew Ure [URE 36], in a book titled The Philosophy of Manufactures, set the tone: “Such is the factory system (…) which promises, in its future growth, to become the great minister of civilization to the terraqueous globe”. He explains that the great chimneys are a step forward from the smaller workshops, breweries and foundries of the artisanal production model.

3.3.1. Territory: an immaterial asset

Economic research into territories performed over the last couple of decades [AYD 86] demonstrates the importance of territorial immaterial assets, at the core of which is social capital, which contributes to building an innovative environment that will grant a competitive advantage. Today, this is a point that is present neither in corporate strategies nor in territorial reindustrialization policies. The OECD [OEC 14] is currently developing the concept of smart specialization that aims to identify territorial expertise around enabling technologies using the Porter model. The idea is to encourage businesses to identify a territory’s traditional expertise and the benefits of a technology of a new scientific breakthrough. This model recognizes the role of endogenous growth and the principle of increasing returns tied to learning processes, as well as the territorialized accumulation of knowledge. This is an unusual approach with these types of institutions bound by the rules of standard economics that ignore the principle of increasing returns. Thus, European territorial funding (EFDR) will be replaced with specific funding for these territorialized enabling technologies. The Regional Center of France is currently serving as a test subject for this type of implementation. It is important that businesses integrate this into their strategies.

Designing smart cities cannot occur independently of territorial characteristics. Identifying a city’s dynamic of “innovative environment” will play a critical role in the success of modeling, according to the concept developed by Philippe Aydalot. Its anthropological dimensions – history, culture, demographics, etc. – contribute to a social intelligence, which is one of the parent disciplines of competitive intelligence developed by Stevan Dedidjer. This will play a critical role in the success of modeling once the fact that residents are at the core of smart cities as producers and receivers of information, artifact users, and ultimately the ones that choose which equipment to use has been integrated into a city’s development. The ecosystem’s approach responds to the needs of a sustainable society organized around the common good.

In his particularly brilliant thesis [HUR 13], Philippe Hurdebourcq, researcher and director of a regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry in France, identified and formalized three dimensions of a smart territory, which is first and foremost an innovative environment. The first dimension of this environment is a network of stakeholders located on the same territory – geographic proximity – utilizing information technologies to help connect to organizational networks beyond the geographic territory. The second dimension aggregates expertise and technologies, which is a territory’s cognitive capital. The territorial dynamic, if it functions, will mobilize this capital to perform the transition of an obsolete technological cycle towards the integration of new technologies. The third dimension is of course cooperation within these networks, which gives birth to local productive systems (LPS)⁵. These territorial logics help create external economies, agglomeration economies and, often, help open economies up to external markets because they offer businesses a sufficient critical size to consider sharing tertiary industrial services (R&D, marketing, communication, etc). Smart territories inherently produce a cycle of positive innovation that reinforces the appeal of the territory, which in turn reinforces the LPS by incorporating new players.

One of the surprising elements of the meticulous investigation lead by Philippe Hurdebourcq is that entrepreneurs, when they are even empirically aware of the nature of the territory and inherent advantages it provides, remain attached to a common discourse on the material benefits. Such benefits can include factors of attractiveness shared with public stakeholders, which in practice prevent territorial stakeholders from capitalizing their advantages as a smart territory. Figure 3.6 shows the falsehood of such a notion.

The administrative devices based on attractiveness of material advantages will begin by increasing through learning, capitalizing on expertise (immaterial capital) on which the territory can rely during the transition from one technological cycle to another, thus avoiding adaptation crises. However, these devices are not geared towards making a case for increasing the social capital and a territory’s immaterial capital. This notion is actually barely taken into account in local development strategies, which always fail to consider the four types of advantage a territory can have:

• – Two forms of tangible capital:
  • - physical capital, or natural capital, is a tangible resource that is non-transferrable and inimitable, such as a strategic geographic position, the presence of natural resources or the beauty of a site. A disadvantaged site will have to create other assets to become appealing, something we see with the old mining basins in Northern France, which recreate their territorial dynamic through other means than their industrial past within a natural environment that is not particularly appealing. This also includes the ecosystems that absorb and destroy waste and have a maximum processing capacity, which rich countries, in accordance with the Summers doctrine, circumvent by exporting their waste to poor countries;
  • - material capital, including infrastructures, buildings, machines and hard technologies, has a low mobility but is easily transferrable via reproduction. It constitutes a barrier to entry simply due to the volume of the required investment.
• – Two forms of intangible capital:
  • - intellectual capital is more complex. There is formal intellectual capital, which is that of residents and institutions. There is a certain mobility to this element since it can be moved with people, or by replicating institutions like when a university creates an international branch. However, there is also a dimension to this that is rooted to the territory, first of all because people are not as mobile as predominant ideologies would suggest [FLO 02]⁶ and secondly because abilities and expertise reproduce idiosyncratically: the more one learns, the more that person is conditioned by what he or she has learnt and knowledge is placed into an institutional context of rules that favor innovation or not. Great minds can be attracted to a territory with brain drain strategies – France has an advantage here thanks to the quality of life of its territories – but these will have to take root in a host territory. Intellectual capital is therefore only reproducible over a long period of time – it takes at least a generation for newcomers to take root – and on the condition that they enter a symbiotic relation with local knowledge;
  • - social capital represents the collective value of all of the social networks and incentives to do something for one another. It is the wealth of transactions between individuals and social groups, which represents fodder for innovation and social and civic life. It is typically this atmosphere, identified by Alfred Marshall at the end of the 19th Century as an immaterial asset of the territory that favors risk-taking and rewards entrepreneurial success. It affects natural solidarities and work relations, it has a built-in conflict resolution system, it allows collective professional action and it is able to push social and socio-technical consensuses forward. It is therefore a semi-natural ecosystem that finds its roots in history, allows survival over time and helps manage technical market changes.

3.3.2. The territory secretes innovation (and not the other way around)

The environment is therefore not homogenous, as standard economics seemed to suggest. It does not consist of a neutral support for production activities, which impact a company’s decision on a location in the form of transportation costs that affect the flow of goods from where they are produced to where they are consumed or used. It is not just a support function for a function of production. The territory appears as a living entity, which is able to protect its businesses and provide them with a competitive advantage that allows them to be competitive at an international scale. In addition, unlike what used to be the case, the territory does not do this solely via its natural resources, or more generally, through its generic resources the value of which could be considered as independent from their production process or a company’s expertise, which is, in that case, likely to behave predatorily, since it could consider that they may be acquired in any location under market conditions. This is the criticism that Gabriel Colletis makes of the French government’s policy, which has “always proceeded with a vision of the industry in question, not as global system (marked by the density of relations between businesses and/or other institutions such as universities, research centers) but as a simple sum of businesses. French industrial policy, unlike German industrial policy, has never sought to take into account the interdependencies between sectors within what could be considered a productive system” [COL 12]. Confidence, networks, and an atmosphere favorable to innovation are a selection of the non-standardizable and non-copyable processes that compose a territory’s sustainable competitive advantage.

For Philipe Aydalot [AYD 85], the territory is what offers its economic stakeholders the ability to secrete innovation. He considers that the territory is a partner to a business, just the same as a client, supplier employee, or a shareholder. By establishing collaborative relations between its local stakeholders, a business can contribute to reducing transaction costs, establish a climate of mutual trust and reduce the risks and information costs that go with that, while increasing their respective competitiveness and providing irrecoverable gain. This will thus solidify their position through their immaterial, cognitive, ethical or organizational inputs.

Conversely to the theories of Richard Florida, it is the territory that creates innovation and not the import of the social capital of the supposed “creative classes” in a territory strictly enclosed into an urban space. For Philippe Aydalot “an innovative business does not pre-exist its environment, on the contrary it is secreted by it”. The territory is generally an immaterial capital which is characterized by a number of factors: history and an ability to generate a common project; the ability to generate consensuses, which is correlated with the dynamic of innovation; immaterial territorial assets, such as the access to technological knowledge; the composition of the job-market; and a technical expertise that makes up the three components of an innovative environment. Through its characteristics, this environment generates innovation of any sort. We identify three dimensions within this (Figure 3.5):

• – Local production systems are characterized by their proximity to production units, which maintain more or less intense relations. These businesses can be members of the same sector, have similar expertise or share a similar product, and be confined to the same region or employment pool. The novelty of iconomics is that geographic proximity can be complemented (but not replaced) with digital networks. It allows pooling, development and innovation by creating a network-like dynamic.
• – These LPS produce innovation in the sense that Schumpeter meant it, i.e. new combinations among products, services and technologies. Producing these combinations and integrating new technologies into old diminishing returns ones helps revitalize old industrial pools. French steelwork was a mono-industry heavily territorialized onto mining sites. In going from a focus on tons of product – its old performance metric (which was the case for all extraction activities) – to a metric that could be measured in gigabytes contained in the steel they were producing, it introduced an immaterial dimension to its added value and stimulated the diversification of activities around its production sites.
• – Territorial appeal, which neoclassic economics claims to be purely composed of low salaries or fiscal dumping. The appeal of an industrial area is not its price per square meter, but the synergies offered by its networks. Specialized in precision cutting software for the textile industry, the company Lectra System did not give in to the siren songs of outsourcing in search of low salaries during the textile crisis. On the contrary, it stood fast in its little town in Gironde near Bordeaux to bet on the dynamism of the local networks creating more value than savings made on salaries from employees reduced to no more than automatons.

3.3.3. The territorial dynamic in action

The Choletais region, around the city of Cholet, specializes in off-the-rack clothing and shoe manufacturing – two declining industries – but has succeeded in converting itself to iconomics, something that governmental projects that sought to group businesses together and make them “global scale companies” failed to do. The region was able to achieve this thanks to the quality of their social capital with economic actors showing solidarity to one another (“no-layoff” practices) and policies rooted in social Christianity that stimulated synergies among companies, cities, rural workshops and training devices. The two sectors of activity present in the Choletais – clothing and shoe manufacturing – entered phases of diminishing returns back in the 1960s. The textile industry received government input and focused on making global-sized companies, while the shoe industry mobilized its network of sub-contractors to reinvent itself to face the competition from Asia that was flooding the markets with shoes that were of the price at which the Choletais was buying their leather. The quality of the interactions within the territory allowed them to use their technological assets and target high-end markets. Beginning in 2004, all activities within the Choletais were uniting within a cluster organized into subsets of businesses around a common theme: children. This is the only cluster in France to be organized into a market theme rather than an industrial sector.

The Swiss watchmaking industry, faced with the shocking appearance of the digital watch – which potentially announced the death of the watchmaking industry – was able to utilize its expertise – high-precision micromechanics – and reuse it for neighboring sectors such as fabricating prosthetic hips. This restarted a local industrial fabric thanks to the interdependence among industrial sectors and a culture of common cooperation. On the other side of the Jura Mountains, French companies did not enjoy the same atmosphere and suffered from a lack of solidarity between industrial clients and policies that favored large-scale research rather than valuing the ability for innovation of personnel. These industries did not experience the same social climate.

The territorial dynamic, continues Bernard Pecqueur [PEC 07], creates a prosperity founded on endogenous elements (their specificity) and exogenous elements (their ability to fit into the world economy). In a general sense, “the adoption of organizational models based on the horizontal decentralization of services at the expense of vertical hierarchical models ensures a better reactivity in the face of changing economic and technological environments”, says François Caron, a reference author in the field of innovation history [CAR 12].

The intelligence of a city cannot be considered separately from the intelligence of the territory and results from the convergence of a number of spheres (Figure 3.2): the atmosphere of the territory, which favors risk-taking, with rich interactions among individuals allows the territory to evolve over time; and the industrial dynamic: the more an industry is rooted in its territory, the more it develops specific competitive advantages resulting from interdependences with the local fabric which, for example, make cost-based outsourcings pointless. An industrial offer to produce a smart city cannot simply be a sum of technologies but must look for synergies through the principle of coopetition⁷.

In the given examples, these ecosystems formed naturally depending on historical and cultural factors. However, can we encourage this dynamic and combine top-down public policy with bottom-up organic decision-making?

Countries that come from an authoritarian and centralizing tradition such as Russia and China are taking an interest in these approaches. This does not seem to be the case for France, which appears to be totally set on centralization and metropolization.

3.5.1. A city is a living system…

Historically, cities were identified by economy analysts as places where synergies developed between activities with increasing returns. Neapolitan Antonio Serra, in a book that paved the way for modern economics, compares Venice, a city with no land for agriculture, and Naples, a city which has an abundance of it. Venice has been a sustainable city thanks to the synergies between its industrial activities (including naval construction), its merchant activities and its military power. It began declining when the pole of the developed world shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. At the other end, Naples, seat of the viceroy to the Spanish throne with great agricultural wealth and money from the New World, was unable to reimagine itself and leave feudalism.

The interaction between a city and its environment was modeled by Johan Heinrich von Thünen in the 19th Century: at the center of the city are the strongest synergies between activities with increasing returns – industrial activities – then six concentric areas organize the activities with gradually diminishing returns – primary and service activities – and the transportation costs increase, defining a boundary which Fernand Braudel called a “world economy”.

With the second industrial revolution at the end of the 19th Century, city development became guided primarily by the quest for returns to scale, at the expense of social solidarities and civic life, as analyzed by Emile Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society (1893).

3.5.2. …which we understand today through new approaches…

Geoffrey West’s mathematics of the city¹¹ provides a scientific support for Jane Jacobs’s empirical intuition that insisted on the necessary “village” dimension that should be maintained to allow for creative interactions between residents and their activities and to use social capital efficiently. Jacobs [JAC 85] considers that wealth is not produced by the accumulation of urban assets (such as large operations of urban renovations), but with the ability of residents to engage in the production of said assets and the urban system’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances. The error of urban policies, she says, has been rationalizing cities and adapting them for a few functions by importing others, whereas wealth is created by the interaction of all urban activities, considered unprofitable as standalone, and advocating the substitution of imports from outside the city via the means of diversified urban activities.

What highlights the critical point when modeling this system is the border between the city and its outskirts. It is essential, on the one hand, since by definition a system is differentiated from its environment by a border (without which it would not exist and would be ungovernable), which defines what is “within” it and what is “outside” it, representing exogenous parameters, the number of which and the variance of which define the turbulence of the environment. This boundary must characterize the urban ecosystem in that it is coherent and stable, creating wealth through internal activities and importing only what makes sense to import. Furthermore, on a material level, a city’s extension exists within a geographic context. Before the second industrial revolution and the development of telecommunications, cities and their outskirts were structured by the distance measured by the speed of information – a man on a horse, then a boat and then a railway. The second industrial revolution allowed, for the first time, the “death of distance” making distance no longer the structuring element of these territorial ecosystems and the end of the “Thünen zones”. The consequence has been the “oil-slick” urban growth along with energy consumption and the development of a dysfunctional urbanization, denounced by Jane Jacobs, in housing, work and administrative functions.

The “death of distance” means that Thünen zones can extend to the entire world¹². Cities will concentrate on high added-value activities, while activities that pollute a lot and have poor working conditions are rejected far into the outskirts. This way, even if a city may appear to be “green” within its administrative perimeter, the evaluation of its ecosystem must include the externalities of outsourced activities. For instance, the carbon footprint of a “green city” must include its imported CO₂: a city may be green but its ecosystem dark grey (Figure 5.17).

3.5.3. …at the heart of which the sciences of complexity…

An ecosystem is the number of dynamic sub-systems in constant interaction (energy management systems, transport systems, water management systems, social systems, climate ecosystems, residents, facilities, etc.), and which interact with their collective environment while maintaining the ability to preserve their identity and improve their internal diversity. In the evolution of natural ecosystems, they schematically go through three types, from type I that finds its resources and rejects its waste into its environment, to type III that recycles completely just like the biosphere [AYR 96]. The idea of an “ecological engineering” that would allow us to create “viable industrial strategies” inspired by natural ecosystems was formulated in 1989 [FRO 89]. An industrial ecosystem can never attain stage III due to the entropic nature of the economic process [GEO 70]. Its design requires specific modeling and architectural skills that link disciplines with abilities spread out through different companies in a common architecture.

One application of this approach is illustrated by the constraints imposed on Chinese eco-cities. An ecosystem differs from a system in that the interactions between its different internal elements make it capable of reproducing or even producing (as is the case in autopoietic systems) the rules of its operation as a whole or in part.

3.5.4. …help conjugate internal semi-stability and external instability

The choice of the border of the system is therefore critical in the eyes of the problem in question, which is a key point in the engineering of complex systems: defining what is “within” and what is “outside”. In the ideal types of Thünen zones, each zone has a specific function and defined interactions with its neighboring zones, in the order of decreasing complexity from the center towards the outskirts, the whole thing making a sustainable ecosystem since the Thünen model allows very little to no exchanges with the outside. In real life, this system would be subject to destabilizing actions from the outside that would threaten the internal equilibrium of the ecosystem.

Another essential characteristic of the sustainable urban ecosystem, just like natural ecosystems [HOL 73], is its resilience, or the ability to learn and to adapt to rapid fluctuations in its environment, including crises and disasters, and generate new rules that will allow it to face an increase in external turbulence. The school of High-Reliability Organizations, started by Karlene Roberts [ROB 90], helps define organizational traits in terms of process design, information circulation and processing, understanding and mastering human factors, and governance systems to allow sustainability in the organization in a turbulent environment including foreseeable yet unpredictable disasters (marine submersion, seismic activity, terrorism, etc.).

Today we have a rich body of operational research surrounding organizations facing uncertainty with the works of Christian Morel on absurd decisions [MOR 12]. We talk about an absurd decision when there is a radical disproportion between the reference rationality of an individual or a group and the objective they wish to achieve. One classic example is the application of a procedure that is designed for the situation of a given complexity to a far more complex one. These mistakes are purely human and rely on procedures and systems designed by people, which lead to radical and persistent errors. The first works by Christian Morel started with the observation of the frequency with which US surgeons operate on the wrong side of a patient. The risk for error increases dramatically in emergency or crisis situations where the ability to think is sometimes absent.

One of the reasons that the residents of the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, refused to have their city rebuilt by a central agency following its destruction from a series of earthquakes in 2011 was precisely that such an agency cannot integrate all the parameters of the complexity created by an earthquake, and that such an approach would sterilize the capacity for initiative of the city’s residents. Once we know that the earthquakes will come back, if we want the city to be resilient, the residents must be granted the ability to establish and manage scenarios which prepare them to react to the unexpected and increase the population’s competency. The city nominated a Chief Resilience Officer and, since 2016, dedicates 10% of its budget to reinforcing its resilience. The idea is that social phenomena (homelessness, poverty, flooding and natural disasters) are not isolated events, but rather global interconnected phenomena that constitute an attack on the system that must be able to respond in its entirety.

These considerations help define the road map to developing the abilities of actors within a smart city. The critical abilities are therefore those of architects and engineers of complex systems and the attribution of these abilities this ability to a central controller who will navigate the interactions between architectural abilities and sub-system proprietors. This, of course, is the complete opposite of IBM’s Big Brother in Rio de Janeiro. The role of this controller is not to do everything, but to animate a design process of meta-rules of operation for a city, a collective intelligence shared by each actor. The roles and prerogatives of local actors must be defined, and the latter must be considered as part of a collective thought process and a creative energy that is difficult if not impossible to model, but which must be accounted for by higher rank systems. The sustainable city includes a definition of the architecture of abilities and roles. This ability will primarily develop with civil planners, and also in company business models, in order to integrate optimization metrics of the whole city and not just the company.