The Uses of Big Data in Cities

There is much enthusiasm currently about the possibilities created by new and more extensive sources of data to better understand and manage cities. Here, I explore how big data can be useful in urban planning by formalizing the planning process as a general computational problem. I show that, under general conditions, new sources of data coordinated with urban policy can be applied following fundamental principles of engineering to achieve new solutions to important age-old urban problems. I also show, that comprehensive urban planning is computationally intractable (i.e. practically impossible) in large cities, regardless of the amounts of data available. This dilemm