Confusion, Complexity, and Concerns: Discussing Whether Urban Analytics Studies and Practices Are Progressing in the Right Direction

This paper discusses whether urban analytics studies and practices are progressing in the right direction, especially when the analytics models are seen to have remained predominantly method-oriented and are rolling out in the industry extensively and quite randomly. These models are focusing more on tackling problems of big data, simulation, and geo-demographics than paying little or no attention to the critical and inescapable reality that contemporary theories and approaches lack a holistic sense—a common ground to overcome fragmentation among ideas, thoughts, and techniques used to address and solve foundational challenges in city planning. Conclusions suggest that, with increased computational power and data availability, urban analytics can, in fact, empower planning theories to work in a common concern for the physical formation of the city if analytics studies and research become more philosophy-guided, focusing on developing a way to unite the theories, than remain learn-by-doing method-oriented, relying on handling data and algorithms without delineating any doctrine of how they uniquely fit in the broad and integrated picture of the urban setting. The method-oriented engagement in analytics studies and practices, particularly its randomness, unavoidably raises the concern of ontological discontinuity in perceiving urban phenomena that comprise the state of equilibrium in urban environments. Indiscriminate use of urban analytics without following a unified city planning philosophy cannot guarantee that the analytics solutions would not act incoherently and conflictingly against the complex and interconnected phenomena, events, and trends of the urban setting and, in consequence, would not create new confusion, complexity, and concerns instead of solving the prevailing ones.