Why This Course?

City As A Data Mine is the name of a graduate course we finally started teaching at Architectural Design Computing Program at Istanbul Technical University, as of Fall 2020. Ahu and I, Ceyhun, we’ve been working on this since some time (about a decade) and with a lot of detours but it finally became true very recently.

Why this course? Here is a series of statements, which will certainly evolve.

(1) We love the city.

(2) We want to understand the city better, we want to explain what it is in a better way.

(3) The concept of a city has always been complex. It has got even more complex in our times.

(4) Imposing what the city is cannot be in the jurisdiction of administrators, rulers, and tyrants. Citizens should have the most say on what the city should be and where it should evolve.

(5) Data produced by the city, by the citizens within the city, and analytics methods built on top are the best possible means to answer complex urban problems and bring the citizen back to the decision making process about what the city should be in a particular country and/or geography.

(6) Having said these, we are aware that urban data and analytics methods leveraging such data might establish a tyranny of their own. We do not dismiss that very possibility, we are cautious about it and we are not after a mechanistic, dull understanding of the city. That would exclude the serendipities of the nature and the humans therein, and the creativity of urban designers and architects who contribute to the built environment. Although almost everything can be seen as data, not everything can be fairly measured. Furthermore, data analytics might have its own way of lying when employed by the wrong minds, as happens with pretty much all sorts of scientific and technological progress. As such, cities will always need thinkers, dreamers, visionaries, and hard-working practitioners. Our aim is to equip such people with data analytics skills and resources.

(7) Cities and citizens produce data. Urban planners make data-driven decisions about the city every single day. In that sense, we are not claiming any novelty. What we are aiming at is universal and has been widely adopted by many researchers across the world. But we believe in our country — Turkey, in our geography, data-driven understanding and decision making has not been the primary feat in the urbanization of the land (as in many other areas). We want to propose and advocate for this alternative strongly, we want to promote it and raise awareness about its appropriateness, honesty and effectiveness. That is where we believe to be different or pioneering.

(8) In an era where design has become human-centered more than ever, a thorough understanding of cities, built environment, and citizens is beyond the capabilities of one single mind, even though that mind is the mind of a genius or a person of strong will such as Haussman, Moses or Le Corbusier. Urban data analytics is the first step to acquire a better understanding of the city and citizens therein.

(9) As we start, in Fall 2020, we want to put more emphasis on understanding rather than coming up with design proposals. Maybe that will remain as our principal goal throughout the years ahead. We keep the suspicion that the alternative might serve the very opposite of what we are trying to achieve.

(10) We want to expose what the city is and where it evolves to as citizens perceive and experience it rather than to define what it ought to be. We want to serve as a communication channel, novel, more objective, more citizen-centered.

(11) We will probably contradict ourselves many times. We hope our followers will correct us as we move and that they will contribute to this tough endeavor with open hearts and minds and joyful work.