“Urban intelligence involves site-based experience, participant observation, and sensory engagement. We need new models for thinking about cities that do not compute.” For media theorist Shannon Mattern, in A City Is Not a Computer (2021),the act of sensing represents much more than what sensors do. Sensing is the bodily exploration of our environment – the body being human, animal, machinic, or more. It involves all senses and offers the possibilities for “noticing” – a mode of attention that redistributes agency between human and non-human observers – as an alternative way to comprehend what surrounds us.
Working with do-it-yourself sensors and participatory communities, researcher Jennifer Gabrys, in How to Do Things with Sensors (2019), develops a kind of collaboration of minds between so-called "artificial" and “natural” intelligences that build an infrastructure of nerves for environmental sensing through citizen engagement. For Gabrys, “practices of monitoring and sensing environments have migrated to a number of everyday participatory applications”. With sensing comes the notion of monitoring, and thus simulation. Via simulations and with the collaboration of algorithms, humans project certain representations of the world, or the worlds we live in, which therefore inform how we understand them. Monitoring becomes operational, giving citizens potential for active participation in the making of their surroundings.