Urban spaces are now increasingly the result of designers, users and a third new agency which is represented by software (see for example Elmer 1998, Mackenzie 2005, Duarte et al. 2005, Verstraete 2016). Defined as urban assemblage, this notion has been recently elaborated in Kitchin and Lauriault (2014) and Carta (2019a and 2019b) among others, defining the urban environment as the indivisible combination of people (individuals who produce and consume data and information), the built environment (the physical extent of the city and its architecture) and software (the ubiquitous presence of computers).

This symposium aims at exploring in particular the last element of this tripartite system: computing intended as a ubiquitous, pervasive and ramified presence in urban life. We are interested in the role of software as an increasingly autonomous actor able to learn, improve itself and continuously perfect the relationship Human-machine.

This symposium calls for ground-breaking ideas and provocative thoughts, projects, demos and reflections to explore how software, more specifically ML/AI will change cities and the spaces in which we live in the near future.

The symposium is organised in three main sessions: Software that learns (exploring the ways in which computers are able to acquire knowledge), Visible and invisible actors (examining the visible and invisible forces at play in the contemporary city), and Human-machine-city (discussing the complex relationships among computers, people and the built environment).