From Noise to Knowledge: Smart City-Responses to Disruption

Abstract

Based on the assumption that so-called “Smart Cities” ought to have an ability to detect and properly respond to disasters, the article presents a descriptive model for urban disasters. The discussion of how urban disasters evolve leads to an inquiry into the systemic mechanisms of cities, and the dynamics of urban disasters. Cities can be described as amplification systems with the capacity to magnify in-put values through positive feedback. This stimulates the core hypothesis of the paper: Incompatibilities between urban systems generate friction (“noise”) as in-put variable to the urban amplification mechanism which eventually triggers the occurrence of urban disasters. Disaster can be thus defined as positive feedback of negative input values to a scale of complexity beyond control. However, low-level noise shall be regarded as a natural feature of cities, or any other complex systems as it plays a central role in indicating risks and building up disaster resilience. The model describes potential paths of disaster build-up and mitigation, and induces three knowledge-based strategies for urban disaster resilience: (1) “Noise intelligence”, which calls for an awareness of urban frictions in order to supply early information on potential disaster build-up; (2) “Disaster Creativity”, which holds that creative ad hoc problem solving is a key ability in the case of disaster, apart from inflexible principles of disaster management; (3) “Noise to Knowledge”, which is a learning concept based on the assumption that creative disaster response must be trained with the “natural noise” as emerges in any complex urban system.