City, Memory (2)

Excerpted from notes written on 2019-11-03

There are cities that implement policies to make residents fit certain standards, and cities that implement policies to expand standards to fit their residents. The characteristics of a city can be understood by observing how policies change in response to residents' behavior.

How does a city observe its residents' behavior? It would be ideal to collect and log all the information that residents receive and generate while residents are connected to the city, and analyze it later. However, this is impractical because it requires vast storage space to gather information from all residents and necessitates developing methods to analyze this data (moreover, we need to consider what 'all' is when we are saying we are collecting all information from residents.). Therefore, it's more realistic to establish a system that selects and records only partial information about specific situations, periodically analyzes this data, and records the results.

What information is collected, how it's analyzed, and how the analysis results are incorporated into policies can be said to form the foundation of the city.