State of Cities of Things - event report
Looking back at a panel and reflections on the state of cities of things
Last Friday, 24 April, we reflected on living with intelligent things in our cities, at an event organized by Cities of Things. The first conclusions from 31 interviews with experts were presented, and a panel of four experts and the other participants reflected on the manifesto’s first draft.
Iskander Smit presented, next to a look back at seven years of Cities of Things activities, the shift from embodied AI (intelligence situated in a physical body that moves through and acts upon the world, objects, and city robots) to physical AI (intelligence distributed across infrastructure and environments), and the influence of The Agentic Turn. The mirror worlds of embodied AI and physical AI are opening up an immersive AI space that takes an active role. How to design for that context? And which principles to consider?
The four panelists - Maria Luce Lupetti, Sen Lin, Tomasz Jaskiewicz, and Vera van der Burg - presented their positions. Combined with the discussions with the other participants, this leads to six first conclusions from the event:
1. The imagination-deployment gap is the central problem. Tomasz’s seventy-year tour of interactive architecture, from Friedman through Archigram to Wijkbots, showed extraordinary vision but minimal real-world deployment. This isn’t a technology problem; it’s institutional and economic.
2. Convenience is the most powerful and hardest-to-resist force. Sen Lin’s personal story about resisting facial recognition payment until his phone died, then adopting it, was the event’s most striking moment. Convenience doesn’t ask for consent, it just becomes the default path.
3. China and Europe are complementary, not competing. China deploys first and pushes friction to the individual. Europe governs first and accumulates friction at the institutional level. The friction doesn’t disappear, it migrates. Both models are incomplete.
4. Antagonism is a political signal, not irrationality. Maria Luce’s shift from optimistic “things as citizens” to studying agonistic resistance tracks the field’s maturation. The Italian grassroots communities building their own local AI models represent the constructive version of this pushback.
5. AI as reflective partner, not productivity tool. Vera’s ceramics-and-AI practice, training on her own data, generating outputs, physically recreating them, then feeding back, showed AI as a medium for self-understanding rather than automation.
6. Missing feedback loops are the systemic failure. The most urgent finding: citizens have no mechanism to contest, modify, or even understand the AI systems deployed around them. Physical buildings require a democratic process; digital systems just appear.
Some concrete design principles to develop further, or give more focus, in the manifesto:
Designers who start with process rather than form are more likely to create systems that actually function in communities.
Every deployed AI system should include by design a mechanism through which affected people can signal problems, propose modifications, and see evidence that their input changed something.
Collect your own data, annotate it with your own subjective categories, train your own model, make something from the output, and reflect on what the gap between your intent and the model’s interpretation reveals.
Designers working on urban AI should prototype early, prototype rough, and prototype in public.
Designers must build friction into the architecture of the system, not rely on individual choice.
Designers must plan for graceful degradation, what happens when the AI layer of a building becomes obsolete.
Intelligence should enrich a space that already works, not make a non-functional space dependent on systems that may not persist.
The definitive version of the manifesto will be completed in the coming weeks, using the inspiring conversation we had last Friday.
Keep an eye on citiesofthings.org for the latest developments, or connect with us for more details!
One last thing: As you do nowadays, I asked Claude to reflect on the captured recordings. Apparently, more was heard than we did in the room:
“During Maria Luce Lupetti’s and Sen Lin’s presentations, audio from a documentary about London’s “Blade Runners” — masked vigilantes destroying ULEZ surveillance cameras — bled through the recording. The juxtaposition was accidentally perfect: while Lupetti discussed agonistic responses to autonomous systems, the documentary narrated citizens taking direct action against surveillance infrastructure. This unintended layering illustrated the real-world urgency of the manifesto’s themes more vividly than any planned demonstration could.”