We consider the smart city not as an addition of « smarties » (technological devices) but as system capable of evolution all along its lifecycle. This cycle has been described as Urban Lifecycle Management (Rochet 2015) since a city never dies and must be able to reconfigure itself while its internal and external environment changes. Literature on cities as evolving ecosystems (Batty 2015) considers this evolutionary process can’t be steered in top down way, either by a supra rational actor, or on a self regulating basis as claimed by the authors of the first order cybernetics. Integrating all the components of this evolution in the context of iconomics (economics of the III° industrial revolution)we examine why direct democracy appears to be the best drivers for this regulation and what could be its process.

1. Direct democracy as the keystone
of smart city governance as a
complex system
Claude Rochet 1,
Amine Belemlih 2
1 Professeur des universités
LAREQUOI Université de Versailles Saint Quetin en Yveline
Claude.rochet@univ-amu.fr
2 PhD student
Université Paris Dauphine

2. Abstract
 We consider the smart city not as an addition of
« smarties » (technological devices) but as
system capable of evolution all along its lifecycle.
This cycle has been described as Urban Lifecycle
Management (Rochet 2015) since a city never
dies and must be able to reconfigure itself while
its internal and external environment changes.
 Literature on cities as evolving ecosystems (Batty
2015) considers this evolutionary process can’t be
steered in top down way, either by a supra
rational actor, or on a self regulating basis as
claimed by the authors of the first order
cybernetics.
 Integrating all the components of this evolution in
the context of iconomics (economics of the III°
industrial revolution)we examine why direct
democracy appears to be the best drivers for this
regulation and what could be its process.
25/08/2016
Understanding urban dynamics
The city as a self regulating ecosystem
How direct democracy may work
Summary
EGPA UTRECHT

3. What a smart city can’t be
 A collection of « smarties »
 A techno centric city
 A city without past
 A deterministic system
Smart city = Integrated complex
system
25/08/2016EGPA UTRECHT

4. Middle age cities were smart: organic
development, common good, synergies between
economic activities
25/08/2016
Common good
Vivere politico
Economic welfare
Pivate good
EGPA UTRECHT

5. Top down mono functional city
25/08/2016
Togliatti (Russia):
Monocities have
turned to be an
obstacle to growth
in Russia,
representing up to
31% GDP.
EGPA UTRECHT

6. A (really) smart city is an
emerging ecosystem
 Smart city framework= A great number of interactions between people x
connected objects whose quantity and speed is in dramatic increase at
date.
 The behavior of a system is predictable when the sequence of transitions
from one state to another can be described.
 Emergence takes place when the space of possible states or rules of
transitions change: the city can’t be described by the model that
described it until then. (Heylighen & Joslyn 1991)
 Modeling emergence implies:
1. Mapping the properties, desirable an undesirable, the system can
take.
2. The values attached to theses properties in a precise context.
25/08/2016
Understanding urban dynamics
The city as a self regulating ecosystem
How direct democracy may workEGPA UTRECHT

7. A smart city is an integration of
two kinds of systems
25/08/2016
Hard systems may
be modeled thanks
to the laws of
physics
(conservative
systems)
Soft systems can’t
be modeled with
the laws of physics
(dissipative
systems)
- Social sciences
- Big data
- Autopoeisis
- Multi-agents
modeling
The key of the
success is here…
… while
business is there
Politics must prevail
on a bottom up basis
Understanding urban dynamics
The city as a self regulating ecosystem
How direct democracy may workEGPA UTRECHT

8. Cities scaling laws
25/08/2016
Densité
Potentiel
d’interconnexions
Y=x2 Loi de Metcalfe
But…..
Distance
Interconnexionsréelles
Lois de Von Thünen Tobler
Externalités+et_
Taille
But…..
Taille
Nombredevilles
Lois de Marshall West Bettencourt
Lois de Zipf
EGPA UTRECHT

9. Combining these laws:
25/08/2016
Size x Number of cities
Connectionsxwealth
New town
Clustering medium size
cities
New town
Defining the perimeter and
the
« in and out »
interrelations of the
system is a key issue in
cities’system design
Understanding urban dynamics
The city as a self regulating ecosystem
How direct democracy may work
EGPA UTRECHT

10. Urban dynamics: from neo
cybernetics to autopeosis
 First order cybernetics (Forrester):
 The city as a self regulating system…
 ... Or a super command and control machinery (Rio)
 The 2nd order of cybernetics includes
autopoeisis of human dissipative systems
 The complexity of the city is a combination of
several laws
 There is a positive correlation between growth of
the city size and its complexity....
 ... But there is a good and a bad complexity
Understanding urban dynamics
The city as a self regulating ecosystem
How direct democracy may work
25/08/2016EGPA UTRECHT

11. Good and bad complexity
25/08/2016
At a certain point growing
complexity produces
more negative than
positive externalities and
become unmonitorable
Bad complexity
Good complexity
Growing size
Growingcomplexity
E. g. Detroit, Russian monocities…
EGPA UTRECHT

12. A quasi zero order cybernetics
unable to self regulate
25/08/2016EGPA UTRECHT

13. First order cybernetics city
25/08/2016
The myth of the
super mind and
perfect control
EGPA UTRECHT

14. Autopoeisis: Why and How?
 An autopoeitic system is “”a network of processes
of production (transformation and destruction) of
components which: (i) through their interactions and
transformations continuously regenerate and realize
the network of processes that produced them; and
(ii) constitute it as a concrete unity in space in which
they (the components) exist by specifying the
topological domain of its realization as such a
network.” H. Maturana
 Autopoeisis is a property of human dissipative
system: strong entropy and correlative capabilities to
reproduce itself permanently thanks to its internal
interactions
25/08/2016EGPA UTRECHT

15. Autopoeisis: Why and How?
Autopoeisis makes the system able to face
with the rapid changing of the environment:
“"This generalized view of autopoiesis
considers systems as self-producing not in
terms of their physical components, but in
terms of its organization, which can be
measured in terms of information and
complexity. In other words, we can describe
autopoietic systems as those producing
more of their own complexity than the one
produced by their environment". C.
Gershenson
25/08/2016EGPA UTRECHT

16. Autopeoietic system integration works bottom-up
based on “ordinary actions of the people”
25/08/2016
NO! An evolutionary
process
Integration process is
bottom-up…
… based on ordinary
interactions
 We must
understand how
ordinary people
behave
 Q: Is there an
architect with a
master plan?
EGPA UTRECHT

17. Why do we need strong citizen based
interactions within a system? (1)
 Economy:
 An economic structure based on synergies of economics activities is the
condition to wealth creation which reinforces itself through interaction of
a political power based on the Common Good (Reinert, 2006, Rochet, 2012)
 FFF (Failed, Fragile and Failing states) : The missing link is related to the
lack of increasing returns based on « coopetitive » diffusion of means (…)
productive governance often enforces the development sustainable
productive structures based usually on a participatory system.
 “State failure an fragility are often preceded, or at least accompanied,
by failure and fragility of cities” (Reinert & Kattel, 2009)
 “The more the participatory system is closed to democracy and shared
economic growth with special focus on health, education and
communication infrastructure building, more quickly the divergence
between countries narrow down.» (Reinert &Kattel, 2009)
25/08/2016EGPA UTRECHT

18.  Resilience:
 A smart city is a highly internally connected facing with a
turbulent environment, that challenges its resilience.
 Strong social capabilities enforces the autopoeitic properties of
the system, and consequently its resilience.
 E.g. Christchurch (NZ)
25/08/2016
Why do we need strong citizen
based interactions within a system?
(2)
26/01/201618EGPA UTRECHT

19. Why do we need strong citizen based
interactions within a system? (3)
 Citizen is at the interface of technological devices which
consume and produce data (e.g. The smart phone)
 The frontier between production and consumption is
blurred more than in other cases of information economy
(McLuhan)
 In a rapid innovative system the citizen is a lead user of
the innovation process (Von Hippel).
 The power of these technical systems requires strong
political control to be both fully efficient and not
becoming the level of a totalitarian system (Simondon).
25/08/2016EGPA UTRECHT

20. Direct democracy has a strong
record in the management of
cities and complex systems
 Middle age smart cities (L. Mumford): mix of
formal and informal institutions, strong shared
system of beliefs (smart cities without architect)
 Critical correlations between civic involvement
and wealth creation (Lorenzetti: The effect of good
government)
25/08/2016
Understanding urban dynamics
The city as a self regulating ecosystem
How direct democracy may work
 Schumpeterian economics correlates
synergies between activities, political freedom
and common weal.
 Traditional decision making system may
help modeling a resilient human system e.g:
ongoing research project of modeling an eco-
efficient drinking water network in Angola with
the palaver tree
EGPA UTRECHT

21. New paradigms in public decision
making
 Polycentric governance (Ostrom): deciding in small units on a large
scale
 Bottom up decision processes : e.g. Michael Batty modeling
decision process as a Markov chains to bring back the city in a
ergodic state
 Large deliberative upfront processes reduce uncertainty e.g. The
Parable of the Hare and the Tortoise: Small Worlds, Diversity, and
System Performance (Lazer & Friedman 2005)
 « In short, cities are more like biological than mechanical
systems. The rise of the sciences of complexity, which have
changed the direction of system theory from top down to the
bottom-up is one that treats such systems as open, based more
on the product of an evolutionary process than a grand design »
Michael Batty « A new Science of Cities » 2015
25/08/2016EGPA UTRECHT

22. New techniques arise
25/08/2016
Design thinking (Stanford, Ecole des Ponts)
EGPA UTRECHT

23. A paradoxical research question:
Can we conceive the gov’t of a city that
should not need a government?
 At date, if we assume the benchmark of a smart city is
Singapore, it’s not really a democracy.
 At date, we don’t know large system that have developped
spontaneously self organizing properties .
 Rules, as a genetic code of an ecosystem, are the result of
a long term learning process: Cf. biomimicry
 A Machiavellian approach: The Prince is to fix the good
institution from the top down giving the citizens the rights to
challenge the power of the few in charge.
 We have a lot of reference of direct democracy
experiences, how they were born, how they died.
25/08/2016EGPA UTRECHT