There is a strong metaphorical connection between cities and computers. In fact the term “smart city”, which directly relates cities to thinking machines, is currently one of the most dominant metaphors in the discourse on cities. A city, as I have previously shown, can never be thought without using metaphors, since it is a very complex entity without clearly defined boundaries. Architects have thought of the city as a house of many rooms, a landscape or an organism with a heart, lungs and veins – to give just a few examples. As Gorge Lakoff (1980) has pointed out, metaphorical interactions produce analogies, that structure our realms of experience and, hence, construct reality. Furthermore, as metaphors always establish two-way-relations, the ‘smart city’-metaphor affects our concepts of ‘cities’ as well as of ‘thinking’ and ‘machines’.
This chapter aims to trace the history of this complex threesome relation. From the metaphor of the city as a thinking person, coined by ancient philosophers, to how it became became mixed up with the machine-analogy, so important in modernity. During the past hundred years, all three concepts have undergone substantial changes due to the industrial and the digital revolution. Today, the boundaries between the three concepts seem to be more permeable than ever: Cities might be machines and machines might be cities, living beings might be machines, cities might be living beings – and all of them might be intelligent. The critical evaluation of the metaphor not only can entangle the different layers of meaning in this complicated relationship, but might even contribute to a redefinition of smart urban development.