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Grey Box City
Building cybernetic urban systems for smarter simulations
Phillipe Costa1
1Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
1phillipe.arquitetura@gmail.com
In this paper we approach the concept of grey box model to understand the
subjectivity and objectivity of urban design. From the beginning of the insertion
of computational systems in the systems management, we understand that some
simulations and the understanding of the city itself were partial: we do not
understand the city and its spatial complexity and we have the pretension to do
urban design thinking that we understand the urban life . Here we will address
some categories of how we can simulate and create our urban systems using a
more tactile cybernetics.
Keywords: Grey Box, Cybernetics, Smart City, Information Technology
INTRODUCTION
Many of the socio-spatial manifestations that take
place in 21st century is organized by virtual and ur-
ban spaces interactions in a constant sensing surveil-
lance between (Claudel; Ratti, 2016). Information is a
fundamental element in this process because it con-
nects these two spaces, formalized through signals
and language systems that allow different actors to
interact. These connections are important both in
the predictability exercise (simulation and possibili-
ties) and design (simulation and projects). With Infor-
mation, we can have more than cognitive processes,
we will be able to formalize the matter in complex
ways, instrumentalizing the perception of informa-
tion in a set of intelligent systems, conversing with
physical space. In this paper we will address more
about these connection processes using the cyber-
netic concept of a box.
For this, however, it is necessary to understand
the process of the systematizations of the urban
project. As cities and science there are several ap-
proaches (using the technical domain in its concep-
tual core) we can interpret the advent of technique
as a means of expressing information. We under-
stand this process in the technologies of Geographic
Information System (GIS) and Information and Com-
munication Technologies (ICTs) in geoprocessing ur-
ban networks, all of which are now recognized as
tools of interaction and spatial agency. Cybernetics
is important because it is the conceptual framework
of computational technologies, where networks, de-
sign agents and the space talk and exchange infor-
mation in the virtuality of cyberspace and cybercity.
“If a city can be seen with what is configured
in space through exchanges of communication and
transport of matter and energy, cyberspace can en-
hance and even complicate our vision and interac-
tion with the space we inhabit. It can create com-
munity synergies, assist the planning and execution
of joint designs, create effective channels with pub-
Data - SMART CITIES - Volume 1 - eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 |767
lic authorities and, perhaps, reheat the real spaces
through greater citizen participation. Networks can,
and have already shown, serve as a vector for the em-
powerment of free and democratic communicative
forms. ” (Lemos, 2004)
Digital technology is an important paradigm in
the intense flow of information because designers,
planners and agents can have the ability to build
a peer-to-peer, feedback-optimized systems to ad-
dress city problems. The intelligent system, we can
understand, is a system of intelligent agents that
evolve and talk through feedback phenomena. Feed-
back is one of the important actions in a sustainable
constitution of urban space, both in the efficient use
of its resources and in the good maintenance of the
system. The urban structures, to which these systems
are attached, begin in this approach with the basic
action of cybernetic mechanisms: input the informa-
tion, which made all urban systems constitutions a
planning conception. What we then constitute as a
space in which we live is the result, through the cy-
bernetic perspective, a cognitive apprehension that
use informational processes: we interpret data, and
we do the information, generating new information
and new data.
The performance of design and planning, as Paul
Pangaro says, is the intelligence todeal with the com-
plexities that we generate of a systematization of sev-
eral intelligent agents (Pangaro, 2015). The system is
a design that seeks conversation. We have the great-
est control when the conversation, confronting en-
tropy, that is, the state of disorder of nature itself, is
faced by the feedback process, the effort of what ex-
ists between the initial state and the modified state.
Whether we are socialbiological, mathematical, lin-
guistic, urbanistic or architectural, the tendency of a
system always to tend to the nature entropy, and that
must be reversed - generating syntropy by means dif-
ferent search for the own evolution. There lies the
concept of intelligence inherent in urban systems. In
this we consider that boxes, delimitations of scopes
where the components form a joint characteristic, is
a cybernetic system.
Figure 1
The Burtsev’s
Evolutionary
Cybernetic System
On the urban scale we have some levels of analogous
information developments in which we use cyber-
netics for building boxes. For systematization pur-
poses, we will present relevant points of the cyber-
netic systems in the urban context exemplified by
Claudel and Ratti (2016) and we will focus on what
later develops as grey box, a model of performance
and simulation. Boxes are strategies of analogies
through which we construct strategies to perceive
the complexities of systems, and use them as:
• Instrumentation: the ability of systems to
measure information by means of sensing
tools. It is the first movement of action against
entropy. We consider this point as the prin-
ciple of the movements formulator whether
they are designable or not. Examples are loca-
tive media (LBM), georeferencing (GIS) and re-
mote sensing. Environmental, energy, social
and political sensors serve as parameters.
• Analytics: the form of see and interpret the
information acquired are, in accordance with
logic, the atribute of a analysis system. In an
urban design, parametric methods are best
known as BIM (Building Information Mod-
eling), SIM (System Information Modelling)
methodologies and the performance man-
agement (PM).
• Actuators: when the systems act physically
in the agency of the city. Whether in plan-
ning, management or project assignments,
the active systems that transform the city in
real time or other deadlines are what archi-
tects generally relate to in the city’s para-
metric management. Batch issues, use and
parceling, templates, landscape projections,
768 |eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 - Data - SMART CITIES - Volume 1
and models of mobility and energy systems
are some of the driving examples we will see
below.
This information flow is an evolutionary process not
very clear, a cognitive learning that lies in the intelli-
gence of the city and its agents in the surveillance of
urban systems. Sassen argues that technology can
emancipate cities and citizens, and in this way, in
a contrary surveillance, the process of constant ac-
tivism of the systems before the flow can have differ-
ent apprehensions and understandings that we can
understand as a gray box, besides of their usual con-
cept. The urban actions predicted here are locally ref-
erenced in the configuration of the events to which
they are established (mobile, urban, modal or even
architectural). These actions help us understand the
complexity, that is, how the city structures itself in
many other systems.
The systemic use of information in various city or-
gans help us to understand both the organic spec-
trum of the whole (in governance and urban analy-
sis) and the relations of different scales at the human
level in the own urban experience (Sassen, 2010). In
this perspective, we can also interpret that we must
understand the system in how they are made in dif-
ferent ways at each moment, in a dynamism that
goes beyond the assignments of a designer or a plan-
ner. In the view of Cybernetics we will configure the
system capacity to generate new uses in an environ-
ment with conversation and simulation.
SYSTEMS AND THEIR COMPLEXITIES
The relationships made in design and spatial agency
are communication structures, fed by information
sources, to which planning form the basis of system-
atization cycle of urban design. Designs are traps of
information (Flusser, 2007) that we deal with in log-
ical structure that, in the urban context, has intelli-
gence imbued by the city agents themselves (peo-
ple, institutions, buildings, open spaces, etc.). This
intelligence is the result of the ability of systems to
go beyond the technical spectrum itself to an adap-
tive spectrum. This is the main complexity of systems
and their flow of information, the challenges of facing
a box.
Whether for sensing or design, any of all com-
plex systems have intelligence as their ability to made
feedback. This characteristic is what system makes
assume a different and adaptive posture, depend-
ing on the environmental and informational condi-
tions. This characteristic can be seen from the self-
regulation of small computer systems to the GPS and
cybersecurity, such as the Center of Operations Rio
de Janeiro (COR). In this example, the system has geo-
referencing inputs and then, during data interpreta-
tion and referencing, these data interact with other
intelligent security systems and are measured by op-
erators, creating an accessable database. Thus, this
system constitutes a maintenance vigilance of the
city integrated to other systems such as CET-Rio,Geo -
Rio (to which we can understand GIS) and later in-
stitutions like community, the mobility systems and
the government itself. These cyclical manifestations
of action and reaction on critical data and visualiza-
tions are the very cybernetic informational fabric of
urban planning and strategy policing (IBM, 2017) that
we can gauge as instrumentalization and analysis of
the city as a box, city box.
Figure 2
The Center of
Operations Rio de
Janeiro (COR).
We must always remember, in the first and sec-
ond instance, that we are assessing the instrumen-
talization of the complex systems of the city as a
cybernetic box. The box emerges as an analogy
to a subjective characteristic inherent in urban an-
alyzes, where the instrumentalizations of both peo-
ple performance and physical systems are put into a
database, transforming into parameters. These regu-
Data - SMART CITIES - Volume 1 - eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 |769
lations, in the perception of city-box use, are a strat-
egy today achieved in cases such as COR in Rio de
Janeiro, Dubuque in the United States and Bornholm
in Denmark, as well as certain urban development re-
gions in the city of Beijing and its technological parks
(Long, 2018). For these processes to take place and
to extrapolate the objective visions of smart cities to
smart systems, we will reflect more on how to open
the systems and learn from themselves.
‘’Even if we manage to achieve such optimality
with adaptive urban systems, caution must be taken.
If we are considering only certain variables for op-
timization, it does not imply that we are solving a
problem completely. [...] Integrating broader set of
variables in the development of adaptive system re-
quires the communication between all sectors of so-
ciety. We are still in the exploratory process for find-
ing efficient ways of achieving such communication
and promoting social participation. This would cer-
tainly be necessary if we pretend to achieve optimal
governance or sustainability. ‘’ (Gershenson; Santi;
Ratti, 2016)
Of course, by environmental factors (here not
only referring to the natural environment, but also
the urban environment itself) we would not be able
to establish a possible connection of constant adap-
tation. Upon materialization this aspect is even less
possible still. What we understand is that bringing
only optimality, that is, in the strict sense of cybernet-
ics that deals with the functioning of the system fully,
would not have city systems over smart and complex
agency. For complex systems, cities are unique be-
cause they have a large number of gray boxes: at the
same time that we have knowledge of them, we will
hardly have the ability to measure them or fully un-
derstand them by their inherent subjectivity. Thus, in
the characteristic of a more actualized and less con-
trolled vision, we will focus on those systems whose
most visible aspects andevident aspects.
The case of the urban mobility structure in
Zhuzhou in China, Autonomous Rail Rapid Transit
(ART), allows us to understand the use of information
sensing, feedback and then its new action (Yu; Kong;
Yan, 2018). This process is continuous: ART evaluates
information through sensing, performs its interpreta-
tion and then stipulates, through a critical analysis of
the environment, a new performance different from
the previous result or other information. This process
later happens again, and so the continuity of this cy-
bernetic loop makes the box-system evolve. Thus,
not only in the urban system, but the design itself
is also stipulated about these constraints: a design
strategy where the designer himself has no knowl-
edge of the box or its actions..
Figure 3
The Autonomous
Rail Rapid Transit
The systemic concepts consider that the information
constitutes the act of giving shape to the systems
themselves. What we perceive is that cyclical pro-
cesses of information apprehension, in the case of
cities, uses smarter data analysis as a catalyst for the
interaction between social agents and urban space
(Lemos, 2004). We perceive this in the ART itself,
which, by measuring a connection between the in-
ternal information (of the system itself) and external
information (performance of human agents), trans-
forms the direction and profile of the system itself.
The intention of ART is to reduce the effort of several
travel cycles to optimize certain uses of mobility, for
which it constantly analyzes. This can be considered
a cybernetic smart system that can be undertaken in
other systems.
770 |eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 - Data - SMART CITIES - Volume 1
‘’Urban space today is pervaded by digital net-
works and systems, creating information that rep-
resents human activity. While most digitally man-
aged urban systems generate operational data for
their own purposes, they normally do not share those
data directly with other systems or the public. As a
result, digital information representing human activ-
ity in the city exists in many different places, locked
within their specific domain.‘’ (Kloeckl, 2014)
As Kristian Kloeckl says, every human activity in
urban space today has a willingness to be considered
information in technological activity. The motto in
this question lies in the connections these systems
make, and how we deal with them. In the case of
Kloeckl, the author analyzes that the interconnecting
characteristic of a system and the constant feedbacks
do not necessarily cause a destabilization, but make
them more efficient from a direct performance point
of view. We can address this technological develop-
ment not only in mobility, but in other boxes that use
the systems of analysis-performance in regions or ur-
ban agglomerations, areas of environmental interest
as well as assemblages of urban traffic or even the
expansions of the city, as shown by Beijing City Lab
(BCL) research group on Beijing itself.
For the researchers of the BCL, it is necessary to
understand, therefore, that the understanding of the
system happens in a progression in which it depends
on the sensing of equipments and people their due
success. Systems are, to a lesser extent, dependent
on each other. This statement lies precisely in the
holistic characteristic that a system is greater than
just its cartesian summation, and it is part of an envi-
ronment. Toclear the black boxes of the city, we need
to answer - even if only partially - an urban question
of how to bring cyber urban systems closer to human
agency and people as a collective sense. Therefore,
Cybernetics can become more useful.
BOX CITY
‘’For the discipline of urbanism, the struggle contin-
ues. Both of these trajectories present challenges in
terms of infrastructure provision, housing, and so-
cioeconomic development. But planners, policy ex-
perts, and economists are no longer the only special-
ists responding to these challenges. New actors enter
the stage and bring new approaches to the field. Per-
haps the most significant developments have hap-
pened in the domain of data-intense methodolo-
gies.‘’ (Offenhuber; Ratti, 2014)
The sociologist Bruno Latour in Science in Action
proposes a broad confrontation that can help in how
we can interpret the phenomenon of the complex-
ity of the cities and the science that we understand
like black box. We can use technology as a means of
disinformation (Virilio, 2006), interpreting the project
as a black-box incompleteness tool; or we may think
we understand it fully. Digital technologies, by the
very use of information that is out of control, can be
black-box simulations and Latour understands that
scientific complexity is a constantly changing field,
and important information lies more in inputs and
outputs and less in internal considerations of its op-
eration and use, just as the strict black box is. But we
need to try open the boxes.
Opening is not easy. The undersntading of black
boxes allows you to extend the very structure that
complexity can have. We care about feedbacks and
inputs, and we look more sensitively at the behav-
ior of the city compared to its systems and inhabi-
tants. The algorithm is part of the systematization
of the box, of course, where this system is integrated
by the dynamic relationship with feedback (Claudel;
Ratti, 2016), but it is only a look at its behavior. This
look that escapes subjective control is the result of
reactions and interactions that the systems, environ-
ment and individuals to which they are inserted in
these free spaces suffer. If science and the urban de-
sign are treated as a power catalyst, we can see them
as unfinished perspective of a clear, comprehensible
white box and the then incomprehension of a black
box model. The city is in a continuous autopoietic
(Maturana way) evolution and the design simulation
is a criticism about reality.
‘’The impossible task of opening the black box
is made feasible (if not easy) by moving in time and
Data - SMART CITIES - Volume 1 - eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 |771
space until one finds the controversial topic on which
scientists and engineers are busy at work. This is the
first decision we have to make: our entry into science
and technology will be through the back door of sci-
ence in the making, not through the more grandiose
entrance of ready made science.‘’ (Latour, 1988)
Figure 4
Simulations using
the system BUDEM
made by Tsinghua
University for
Beijing
The box strategy is a process of stimulate responses
and conversations with the environment and the
community. This process, of course, is an interpreta-
tion to which the observer is made before the system:
a parametric process, for example, is more suited to a
proposal of varied parameters (actuators) than a pro-
cess of instrumentalization and remote analysis such
as COR in Rio de Janeiro. Therefore, better the con-
junctures of a city to understand its information, bet-
ter we deal to the indeterminate information, elim-
inating stochastic structures. The positions follow
empirical logic, it is not a question here of stricto
sensu composing neither a programmed city simu-
lation, but designers can and must use more infor-
mation and informational means to deal with the de-
mands and potentials we already know be of little
control. One example of this is the use of stochastic
and deterministic elements in the BUDEM system in
Beijing.
The box city then becomes continuum between
the aleatory and deterministic, permeating randomi-
ties stochastic equations of black box models and
the deterministic logics of the cellular automata of
the more transparent boxes. Urban analysis around
black boxes has now become relevant now, espe-
cially with the development of AI as well as the pro-
gression in satellite data visualization and informa-
tion and communication technologies, but it be-
comes problematic if used unilaterally. These pro-
gressions are important, of course, but we can influ-
ence ourselves more by taking advantage of other
cybernetic studies as well as of ecology to under-
stand more about the constitution of the gray boxes
as a semi-transparent spectrum of problems, reflect-
ing on the critical theory of the subjectivity of urban
settlements and also of the sociology of space as a
constant non-tree construction (Claudel; Ratti, 2014).
Far from the capitalist pretension that was pro-
moted by smart city or the cold automatism of cer-
tain information devices (Costa, 2018) what we need
to understand here is how grey boxes can help us
in this city agency. We do not just need to com-
puterize by creating algorithms for projects, but we
need to interpret feedback from systems (input and
output) and view information more in communities.
We have already seen this mixed way of visualiza-
tion and subjectivity in Senseable City Lab essays,
like Real-Time Rome and, more recently, Gangnam
Poop. In the Real-Time Rome project, for exam-
ple, data visualization and information actions nar-
row the gap between spatial problems and represen-
tational problems that cybernetics could not previ-
ously achieve. These actions, metaphors of complex-
ity and human subjectivity (such as a feedback be-
tween a Madonna’s concert x texting) run away from
the functionalist pretension of using digital technolo-
gies, which we have said before need to be refuted,
since they are not fundamental but rather partial in
systems of governance and development. The repre-
sentation of information makes the communication
of these systems themselves also an instrument of
citizenship and citizen ownership of the use of digi-
tal technologies (Claudel; Ratti, 2016).
‘’Adaptive cities have the potential of increasing
quality of life for citizens. But how equitable this
increase of quality of life will be? Will all citizens
benefit? At what cost? This is relevant, because
even when cities accumulate most of the wealth
of the planet, they are also the loci of greatest in-
equality. The answers to these questions will de-
772 |eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 - Data - SMART CITIES - Volume 1
pend on how the adaptive urban technology is im-
plemented, regulated, and managed in each city, and
how this technology relates to citizens. This will re-
quire the effective interaction of governments, com-
panies, academia, and society, as each sector may
have different perceptions of the best way of man-
aging cities.‘’ (Gershenson; Santi; Ratti, 2016)
Figure 5
The complex
dynamic system
continuum
On these points Cybernetics needs to be an impor-
tant but more actively interactive path. We still need
to understand how to reduce the persistent noises
in the conversations between objective systems and
human systems involving urban characteristics (Of-
fenhuber; Ratti, 2014). However, the information is
in this act of informing and shaping, the basic consti-
tution of our conversations, it is the inclusion of the
potential dynamism design, action or planning the
city. Today, artificial intelligence contained in para-
metric softwares for modeling and visualization of in-
formation is potential in this experimentation, trac-
ing efficient and dynamic strategies in the result of
urban actions, but we can move forward in bringing
the subjectivity to a party of urban analysis. Here,
then, we need to place ourselves as a bridge between
the stance influenced by science as a narrative tech-
nology phenomenon and how we can look at the ac-
tion practices of urban planners and architects in the
face of the liberation of Cartesianism.
CONCLUSIONS
For designers or planners, the complexity of deal-
ing with the subjectivity and the intense dynamism
of cities enables us to create new strategies and ap-
proaches to get the subjetive information and use it
correctly with the culture. This characteristic possi-
bility of the urban systems, to enable formal-spatial
strategies, are what lead softwares and technology
to search correlations between the city information
and their potentialities. This is a way, as described
by Ratti and Claudel, of interacting with the contem-
porary city smartly and dynamically. It is the ques-
tion of the of cybernetic planning, a dynamic inter-
action between agents and systems, in a systematiza-
tion of monitoring and ecology transformation, nat-
ural or not (Claudel; Ratti, 2016), social or not. But,
other question is: to what extent will we be cyber-
netically smarter?
‘’The connection between spatial and temporal
scales evident in ecological processes may prove use-
ful analytically to approach some of these questions
in the case of cities. What may be negative in a small
spatial scale or a short-time frame may be positive
in a larger scale or longer time frame. For a given
set of disturbances, different spatio-temporal scales
may elicit different responses from ecosystems. [...]
This raises a question as to whether a city needs a
larger system in place to neutralize the impact on the
overall city system of major disturbances within the
city. [...] Unstable systems come to be seen as stable,
bottom-up control turns into top-down control, and
competition becomes less important. This also tends
to suggest thinking of cities as the solution to many
types of environmental damage. What are the scales
at which we can understand the city as contributing
solutions to the environmental crisis¿’ (Sassen, 2010)
It is clear that the design isfaded to be imperfect
and suffer other subjective issues, but in the teleo-
logical and technical consciousness we can make sys-
tems and cities more adaptive, and deal with evo-
lutionary organisms, not stable organisms. A de-
signer needs to establish cybernetic action in sys-
tems to create a network of communication and con-
trol. The persistence of an urban system is not nec-
essarily stable but resilient. Researches in European
cities such as Amsterdam and London show that the
big-time agency and city-planning relationships be-
tween control agents and communication agents,
Data - SMART CITIES - Volume 1 - eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 |773
users, demonstrate increased system efficiency in fu-
ture participative design. We can verify that the struc-
tural systems with urban systems, parallel or not, cre-
ate a dynamic network of different actors that pro-
poses, at the same time, to potentiate spatial distri-
butions of the city in an environment of distributive
systems of information as well as to create a system
of surveillance and control.
What would be the perspective of the smart city?
Can we interpret them as data, measuring these el-
ements in a hermetic way? No. Of course, we find
evidence from Toronto to Sao Paulo, Amsterdam to
Hong Kong, but we must interpret these examples
as critical interpretations of the full urban experi-
ence as ways of interacting with the city systems.
However, we can not fall into the stylistic forgive-
ness, translating as a remote sensing where para-
metric economic magnitudes can dictate the urban
design. A cybernetic action in the city is an action
where new processes of transformation and conver-
sation take place, a more distributive dynamism, less
centralized in the designer and more transpositive
where it becomes increasingly important to mediate
relationships for our community goals. The design
process is in the communication between the con-
structed spaces, the virtual ones (simulation, virtual
sensing) and the relation of the subject, being the
use of cyberspace a connection point - dangerous -
in this equation. What we must understand is that
we should treat information as a process of formation
and constitution of design beyond planning, neither
as mere supporting data.
Digital technology in the city has been paradig-
matic since its inception as a box, being able to mod-
ify how we see our intelligent organisms and our
feedbacks. And this is not a purely building issue, it
is the evolutionary and ecological answer of how we
can integrate the complexity that we are facing with
the digital information society. This discussion cre-
ates a theoretical path for new technological prac-
tices, and aims to establish a more critical research
line forming the different framework on digital tech-
nology, representation, complex systems and design.
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