Cities Are Technology

When most people contemplate technology, their minds immediately conjure sci-fi spectacles: humanoid robots, sentient AI, and interplanetary travel. But technology extends far beyond these futuristic tropes. I think cities count too: large systems we built to solve human needs at scale.

Technology is just applied knowledge in service of practical problems. Cities show what that looks like when the problems are shelter, safety, sanitation, trade, and getting lots of people to live together without everything breaking. From the first permanent settlements along fertile river valleys to the sprawling metropolises of today, urban environments have evolved as complex systems addressing fundamental human needs: shelter, security, resource distribution, waste management, transportation, and social connection.

I’m an unabashed urban enthusiast. I think we badly underrate cities as technology. While we readily celebrate individual inventions—smartphones, vaccines, or electric vehicles—we rarely acknowledge the city itself as a comprehensive technological system. Ancient Rome’s aqueducts, sewers, and multi-story apartment buildings represented engineering marvels that enabled unprecedented population density. Medieval city walls and defensive architecture solved security problems. The grid systems of planned cities from Teotihuacan to Manhattan created navigable order from potential chaos.

The Car-Shaped Problem #

If you’ve followed my writing, you’ve likely realized this represents yet another entry in my ongoing critique of automobile dependency. Lately, more people, especially younger ones, seem willing to say the obvious thing out loud: car-centric development and suburban sprawl do not work very well.

Evidence increasingly demonstrates that automobiles represent a suboptimal solution for urban mobility. Cars deliver extraordinarily inefficient transportation—a typical vehicle weighing 4,000 pounds to move a single 150-pound human being represents an almost comically wasteful energy proposition. They’re demonstrably dangerous, killing approximately 1.35 million people globally each year. And they burn huge amounts of fuel, foul the air, and eat land we could use for better things.

The automobile-centric development that dominated 20th-century urban planning represents a historical anomaly rather than an inevitable evolution. Cities thrived for thousands of years before cars, designed at human scale for walking. The medieval European cities that tourists flock to photograph weren’t designed for pedestrians out of some romanticized notion—they were built that way because it worked. The post-WWII suburban experiment, fueled by cheap oil and government subsidies, created unprecedented dependencies on private vehicle ownership while dissolving the urban fabric that supported community and efficient resource use.

Reimagining Urban Technology #

I acknowledge my climate pessimism—at this juncture, humanity likely faces unavoidable geoengineering interventions, having crossed several critical thresholds. The atmospheric carbon clock continues ticking while emissions metrics trend in alarming directions. Long-term species survival may necessitate stratospheric aerosol injection or massive carbon capture deployment, but those represent topics for another discussion.

Even so, cities are still one of the few places where design changes can materially improve daily life. Rather than subsidizing failing automobile manufacturers or expanding highway systems that induce further demand, we could redirect resources toward rehabilitating our cities as genuinely human environments. We could make them quieter, safer, shadier, and easier to move through without every errand requiring a car.

The transformation requires reimagining public space allocation. Consider that in most American cities, 50-70% of urban land is dedicated to cars through roads and parking—an astonishing commitment to a single transportation mode. We could reclaim substantial portions of this space for tree canopies that reduce urban heat islands, public plazas that foster community interaction, dedicated cycling infrastructure that enables safe active transportation, and efficient public transit systems that move people more effectively than private vehicles ever could.

Cities that have already implemented such transformations demonstrate their viability. Copenhagen’s bicycle superhighways, Barcelona’s superblock model, and Paris’s recent rapid transformation under Mayor Anne Hidalgo illustrate how quickly urban environments can evolve when political will aligns with sound urban design principles. These places didn’t become static museums. People still get around. Businesses still operate. They just gave less space to cars and made daily life better.

I harbor no illusions about the challenges. Entrenched financial interests, cultural attachments to automobility, and institutional inertia create formidable obstacles. The transition won’t materialize overnight, nor will it proceed without resistance. But cities have continuously reinvented themselves throughout human history, adapting to changing needs, technologies, and values.

Cities are one of the few technologies big enough to matter here. A well-designed city uses less energy, wastes less space, and makes ordinary life better. If we treat urban environments as things we built, not fixed backdrops, then we can stop tolerating bad design as destiny.

I can dream about that, sure. I’d rather help build it.