Urban Design in the New Soft City

"A city is not a BMW," writes Carl Skelton. "You can't drive it without knowing how it works."

In an ambitious think-piece on Places, he argues that the public needs new tools of citizenship to thrive in a "new soft world" increasingly shaped by smart meters, surveillance cameras, urban informatics and big data.

"To be a citizen of a digital city requires understanding what the databases do and don’t contain, and what they could contain, and how the software used to process that data and drive design decisions does, doesn’t, and might yet perform."