Citizen One Episode 8: The Reasonable City
A Citizen One Journal Before diving into this next Citizen One episode—a short-form, audio-only reflection I’m calling a Citizen One Journal—I wanted to share a thoughtful signal boost we received this week, and one I didn’t expect. You can read or listen to the essay, The Reasonable City: What Happens When a City Knows More Than Her Citizens?, just below.Fernando Fernández-Monge, senior associate at the Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative, just published a deep and generous reflection on LinkedIn and Substack about the Citizen One podcast episode where I featured the design science work of Ramon Gras and the Aretian team. His essay—titled “The Performance of the Form”—cites recent episodes of the show, including our conversation on fractality, nested agglomeration, and measurable urban performance.Fernando’s piece doesn’t just validate their work. It also acknowledges Citizen One as a new platform that helps surface and share voices like Ramon’s—and elevate the Aretian team’s research into the broader future-of-cities conversation. As the host of Citizen One, an urbanNext original podcast series, I am profoundly grateful to show up as an accidental urbanist, translator, and scribe.In each of these conversations, I haven’t been leading the narrative—just listening for the signal, and helping others articulate and share the work they’ve long been doing.I am also energized by how Fernando has situated the Citizen One series within the broader conversation around data-informed urban design, and challenges all of us to grapple with the tensions between performance, policy, and political reality.What stood out most to me is that he asked hard questions about endogeneity, actionability, and the lived “stickiness” of cities. And he still found room to amplify the value of the ideas—particularly in thinking through how cities can reason with us, not just react to us.This kind of engagement is exactly why Citizen One exists: to surface conversations that don’t usually make it past the white paper or the design render.This week I am also sharing a new solo monologue episode—it’s a live reading of a recent essay of mine, “The Reasonable City: What Happens When the City Knows More Than the Citizen?”That essay, like Fernando’s review, circles the same question:What does it mean to build cities that are not only smart, but wise?Thanks to all of you who have supported the podcast and this broader work around civic design, narrative intelligence, and digital civitas. And to Fernando: thank you for showing what it looks like to think publicly—and generously.Let’s keep building. And now, here’s my new essay.The Reasonable City: What Happens When a City Knows More Than Her Citizens?By Douglas Stuart McDanielSomewhere along the way, we decided we weren’t up to the task.Not of building cities—our cranes never sleep—but of reasoning with them. Of holding space for contradiction, consequence, complexity. So we did what we always do when something feels too broken or too big: we outsourced it. First to planners, then to platforms, now to artificial intelligence.The smart city was just the opening move. A city of sensors. Metrics. Surveillance. Optimized to the edge of the uncanny. A dashboard utopia where everything is measured and nothing is questioned. As Anthony Townsend put it in Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia,¹ this brand of urbanism is less about citizen agency than it is about centralized control wrapped in big tech’s friendly UX.Smart cities react.But cognitive cities? They’re supposed to respond.First, a little context. The term cognitive city emerged in the early 2010s at the intersection of urban informatics, living lab research, and adaptive systems theory—shaped by scholars such as Andrea Caragliu and Chiara Del Bo in Milan,² Herman Schaffers, formerly of the European Network of Living Labs,³ and later amplified by industry voices like Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich,⁴ as well as early work at IBM’s Cognitive Solutions Group⁵ and Siemens Global Smart Cities,⁶ as an evolution beyond the smart city, envisioning urban systems that learn, reason, and respond in real time.Cognitive cities don’t just track—they interpret. They don’t just automate—they anticipate. They imply systems that can think, learn, and adapt. But if a city starts to reason, we have to start asking the question: on whose behalf? And more uncomfortably: whose values is it reasoning with?Because let’s be honest—if we’re building systems to be more rational than us, it’s kind of a confession.We don’t actually trust ourselves to be reasonable. Not in the public sense. Not in the civic sense. And not when it counts.What is reason, in the context of urban life, if not the ability to act beyond self-interest? To design for people we don’t know and will never meet? And to resist the urge to optimize for the powerful, the visible, the loud?But we’ve proven time and again: we’re afraid of that kind of reason.We’re afraid of justice because it threatens comfort. We’re afraid of equity because it implies sacrifice. And we’re afraid of the future because it reveals how little control we ever had.So we hand it off.To predictive models. To black-box systems. To algorithms trained on our worst instincts.And then we call it innovation.But if AI learns from us, then what are we actually teaching it? That a highway plowed through a Black neighborhood is acceptable collateral? That housing is a commodity, not a right? That surveillance is safety—as long as it’s not surveilling us?These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re training data.And they’re being ingested right now, in real time. Cathy O’Neil, in Weapons of Math Destruction,⁷ warns that algorithmic systems don’t clean up human bias—they calcify it. They take historical injustice and repackage it as predictive logic. And because it’s math, we call it objective. But in reality, it’s just bias at scale—faster, smoother, and harder to challenge.Jathan Sadowski takes it further in his work on data capitalism. In his 2019 paper “When Data Is Capital” in Big Data & Society, he outlines how “smart” urban systems often serve as extraction engines, turning civic life into a resource to be mined. This isn’t optimization—it’s exploitation with better branding.⁸So what do we do?We reclaim reason as a civic practice.Not as computation, but as conversation. As care. As courage.Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition,⁹ reminds us that the political realm is not where we go to be efficient—it’s where we go to appear before one another, to act, to speak, and to be accountable. A reasonable city must hold space for that kind of encounter. For debate, friction, and contradiction. Because reason isn’t clean—it’s messy. It’s vulnerable. And it is human.But here’s where it gets interesting.If we design AI not to replace our reason, but to reflect it—what could a city learn from us, if we chose to be better?Ben Shneiderman’s Human-Centered AI argues that the role of these systems should be to augment human judgment, not eliminate it. That includes ethical design, participatory governance, and accountability mechanisms built into the infrastructure and into the AI itself—not bolted on afterward like disclaimers.¹⁰Igor Calzada’s Smart City Citizenship expands that argument, calling for cities where digital systems are designed with and for the citizens who inhabit them. He proposes not just participation, but a digital civitas—a new social contract rooted in collective agency and transparency.¹¹Because here’s the thing:A cognitive city doesn’t have to be a techno-fantasy. It could be a moral prototype.Michael Batty’s The New Science of Cities reframes cities not as objects, but as processes—dynamic systems that evolve based on interaction, not intention. A city that thinks is a city that learns. And a city that learns needs a memory.¹²It needs to remember its redlined maps. Its buried creeks and erased cultures. Its housing policies, its border patrols, its rebellions and revolutions. It must remember the ways it has failed—and survived.Because a city without memory cannot reason.And a city that cannot reason cannot change.So here’s the charge:Let’s stop asking how to build smarter cities.Let’s ask how to build wiser ones.Cities that sense not only traffic patterns and weather anomalies, but loneliness, injustice, and belonging. Cities that don’t just track consumption—but cultivate trust.Cities that use AI to model possibility, not just predictability.We don’t need cognitive cities to be smarter than us.We need them to be smarter with us.To do that, we must prove we are still capable of the one thing AI cannot simulate:Conscience.Because the most dangerous city is not the one ruled by machines.It’s the one where the humans stopped bothering to show up.Citations: ¹ Anthony Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), https://www.amazon.com/Smart-Cities-Civic-Hackers-Utopia/dp/0393349780.² Andrea Caragliu, Chiara Del Bo, and Peter Nijkamp, “Smart Cities in Europe,” Journal of Urban Technology 18, no. 2 (2011): 65–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2011.601117.³ Herman Schaffers et al., “Smart Cities and the Future Internet: Towards Cooperation Frameworks for Open Innovation,” in The Future Internet, eds. J. Domingue et al. (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 431–446, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-20898-0_31.⁴ Dirk Helbing, “Globally Networked Risks and How to Respond,” Nature 497, no. 7447 (2013): 51–59, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12047.⁵ IBM, “Smarter Cities Challenge,” https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/.⁶ Siemens AG, “Smart Infrastructure for Smart Cities,” https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/topic-areas/smart-infrastructure.html.⁷ Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2016), https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317555/weapons-of-math-destruction-by-cathy-oneil/.⁸ Jathan Sadowski, “When Data Is Capital,” Big Data & Society 6, no. 1 (January 2019): 1–12, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951718820549.⁹ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo3644627.html.¹⁰ Ben Shneiderman, Human-Centered AI (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047012/human-centered-ai/.¹¹ Igor Calzada, Smart City Citizenship: Re-Thinking the Smart City Beyond Data and Governance (Singapore: Springer, 2021), https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-53933-6.¹² Michael Batty, The New Science of Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262019521/the-new-science-of-cities/. 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