URBION — Urban Ontogenesis for Conscious Cities

Beyond the Smart City Paradigm: Toward the City as an Urban Organism in Becoming

Roger Wohllk · Architect and Urban Planner, Universidad de Chile · MSc candidate in Artificial Intelligence, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez
Theoretical Article · Version for The Centre for Conscious Design
Derived from URBION: Urban Ontogenesis — Foundational Edition v1.0 · DDI / CRIN Registration No. 2026-A-6117
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · DOI of the reference work: 10.5281/zenodo.20719122

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This article proposes a conceptual transition from the city understood as an optimizable system toward the city understood as an ontogenetic urban organism in becoming. It argues that the Smart City paradigm, despite having produced valuable instruments for urban management, has established efficiency as an implicit measure of a city’s intelligence, displacing a more fundamental question: how can a city continue to transform while sustaining collective life? Through the URBION framework, three interconnected concepts are introduced—Urban Ontogenesis, Heterogeneous Organizational Closure (HOC), and Symbiotic Urban Intelligence (SUI)—and ethical admissibility is presented not as a corrective layer added afterwards, but as the constitutive condition within which urban intelligence may legitimately operate. The article concludes by reformulating Conscious Design as the design of relationships, introducing the figure of the Architect of Conditions of Possibility, redefining resilience as coherent transformation under constraints, and setting out five qualitative criteria for assessing when a city may be considered conscious.

Keywords: Urban Ontogenesis; conscious cities; Heterogeneous Organizational Closure; Symbiotic Urban Intelligence; constitutive ethics; resilience; Conscious Design; Architect of Conditions of Possibility; urban theory.

What if the central task of urban design were not to optimize the city as a machine, but to cultivate the conditions through which it can transform without losing coherence, dignity, plurality, or ecological viability?

Cities are increasingly expected to perceive, calculate, predict, adapt, and respond. Over the past three decades, the Smart City paradigm has expanded the technological capacities of urban environments through sensors, data platforms, digital twins, artificial intelligence, and integrated management systems (Townsend, 2013; Kitchin, 2014).

These developments have generated valuable instruments. They can help cities understand mobility patterns, anticipate infrastructure failures, manage energy, monitor environmental conditions, and coordinate increasingly complex services.

However, the most important challenge facing contemporary cities is no longer simply how to make them more efficient, connected, or computationally responsive. The deeper question is how a city can continue to transform while remaining capable of sustaining collective life.

A city may become technologically advanced while becoming socially fragmented. It may optimize circulation while weakening public life. It may increase its responsiveness while relying on surveillance and behavioral extraction (Zuboff, 2019). It may improve operational performance while exceeding ecological limits or excluding certain communities from the benefits of transformation.

Efficiency, therefore, cannot constitute the ultimate measure of urban intelligence.

This is the point of departure for URBION, a theoretical framework and new urban paradigm that proposes a transition from the city understood as an optimizable system toward the city understood as an ontogenetic urban organism in becoming (Wohllk, 2026a, 2026b).

The machine has been one of the most persistent metaphors of modern urbanism (Le Corbusier, 1923). It suggests that cities can be decomposed into functions, designed through specialized systems, and perfected through technical coordination. Alexander (1965) identified the cost of this reduction early on: a living city does not possess the hierarchical structure of a tree, but the overlapping fabric of a semilattice.

The contemporary platform city updates this metaphor without abandoning it. The city is no longer only a machine: it becomes a network of users, infrastructures, services, interfaces, and data flows managed through computational mediation (Bratton, 2015). As Mattern (2021) has argued, however, a city is not a computer, and treating it as one impoverishes the many forms of urban intelligence that do not take the form of data.

Both models possess explanatory and operational value. Yet they share a limitation: they tend to approach the city as an object whose behavior can be observed, represented, and corrected from the outside.

URBION begins from another premise: the city is not simply something that changes; it is something that becomes through change.

Urban identity is not preserved because buildings, populations, institutions, technologies, or cultural practices remain unchanged. Cities continuously replace and reorganize their components. Their identity persists because particular relationships, meanings, capacities, and forms of collective continuity are regenerated through those transformations.

URBION calls this process Urban Ontogenesis: the continuous production and reproduction of urban identity through the co-evolution of spatial form, collective life, infrastructure, technology, ecology, institutions, culture, and material conditions.

This does not mean that every transformation is ontogenetic. Growth, digitalization, densification, automation, or technological novelty do not necessarily generate a more viable city. A transformation acquires ontogenetic significance when it contributes to the city’s capacity to remain coherent, plural, adaptable, legitimate, and ecologically situated while becoming something different.

Describing the city as an organism requires conceptual caution. URBION does not claim that the city is a biological organism. Nor does it attribute consciousness, subjectivity, intention, or a unified mind to the urban environment.

Here, the organism is not a biologizing metaphor: it is an organizational proposition.

A city acquires an organismic character when multiple, irreducibly different domains participate in preserving the continuity of a shared urban process. Human experience, public space, infrastructures, ecosystems, institutions, artificial systems, cultural memories, legal structures, energy flows, material conditions, and political conflicts operate according to different logics. None of them constitutes the city on its own. Urban identity emerges from their relationships.

URBION describes this condition as Heterogeneous Organizational Closure (HOC). The concept reworks, in urban and organizational terms, the operational closure described by Maturana and Varela (1980) for living systems, without transferring its biological assumptions to the urban domain.

Closure does not mean isolation. Cities are radically open to energy, matter, water, food, migration, information, capital, the economy, climate, conflict, cultural exchange, and ecological processes; in thermodynamic terms, they operate far from equilibrium and sustain their order through continuous flows (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984).

What is closed is not the city’s boundary, but the recursive continuity of its organization: its capacity to regenerate the relationships that make urban life possible while its components continue to change.

Closure is heterogeneous because urban life cannot be reduced to a single substance or language. A wetland is not data. A public ritual is not infrastructure. A legal norm is not an algorithm. A pedestrian rhythm is not a sensor reading. The memory of a neighborhood is not a mobility indicator. Yet all of them can become relationally coupled.

A viable city does not eliminate these differences by translating everything into information. It creates conditions in which heterogeneous realities can remain coordinated without being erased.

This shift also changes how urban intelligence must be understood. In many technological models, intelligence is located in the systems that collect information about the city: algorithms, control centers, predictive engines, digital twins, or artificial-intelligence platforms.

URBION does not reject these instruments: it relocates them. Artificial intelligence is not the intelligence of the city; it is one possible participant within a much wider urban intelligence.

URBION introduces the concept of Symbiotic Urban Intelligence (SUI) as a distributed capacity for perception, interpretation, learning, evaluation, and coordinated response emerging from relationships among human communities, artificial systems, institutions, infrastructures, spatial configurations, material agencies, cultural structures, and ecological processes. The concept draws on the enactive tradition, which understands cognition as situated and embodied activity rather than as an internal representation of the world (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991; Thompson, 2007).

This intelligence is symbiotic because no isolated domain can legitimately monopolize urban understanding. Artificial systems may identify patterns that human institutions do not readily perceive. Communities may interpret meanings and consequences that no computational system can infer from data alone. Ecological systems impose thresholds that neither markets nor algorithms can negotiate away or suppress. Institutions contribute legitimacy, rights, accountability, and continuity. Public space makes encounter, conflict, negotiation, and collective recognition possible (Jacobs, 1961; Sennett, 2018).

Urban intelligence emerges from their interaction.

This distributed perspective also changes the purpose of intelligent systems. The objective is no longer exhaustive prediction or total control. A complex city can never become completely transparent without sacrificing uncertainty, plurality, privacy, or political freedom (Batty, 2013).

The task, instead, is to organize sufficient and situated intelligence that enables viable action while preserving the openness of future possibilities.

A conscious city, in this sense, is not a city that knows everything about its inhabitants. It is a city capable of recognizing relevant changes, learning from their consequences, incorporating multiple forms of knowledge, and correcting its trajectory without reducing its inhabitants to behavioral data.

One of URBION’s central arguments is that ethics must be constitutive of urban intelligence, rather than a corrective layer added after systems have already been designed.

In conventional technological development, systems are often optimized first and evaluated ethically afterwards. Privacy, inclusion, transparency, human oversight, and accountability are subsequently introduced as safeguards around an already established architecture (Pasquale, 2015).

URBION reverses this sequence.

A system based on individualizing surveillance, irreversible automated decisions, opaque behavioral manipulation, political capture, or ecological overconsumption cannot be considered a defective version of Symbiotic Urban Intelligence: it lies outside the paradigm. Ethical admissibility defines the domain within which urban intelligence may legitimately operate.

This includes conditions such as:

• meaningful human and institutional oversight;
• protection against individualizing surveillance (Nissenbaum, 2010);
• transparency and auditability;
• technological and institutional reversibility;
• the possibility of democratic contestation;
• protection against corporate or authoritarian capture;
• ecological and energy viability;
• preservation of political plurality;
• equitable distribution of urban capabilities.

These principles do not imply rejecting technology. They establish the conditions under which it may legitimately participate in urban becoming, in line with emerging international frameworks on the ethics of artificial intelligence (UNESCO, 2021).

An efficient city is not necessarily a conscious city. A city that improves its performance by weakening dignity, autonomy, ecological continuity, or democratic agency may be technically successful while becoming organizationally and ethically unviable.

From this perspective, Conscious Design cannot be limited to creating healthier objects, buildings, interiors, or public spaces, although each remains fundamental.

It must also engage with the relationships through which environments influence perception, behavior, memory, interaction, identity, ecological exchange, and institutional life.

The design question changes. Instead of asking only, “What should this place look like?” or “How efficiently should this system operate?”, we must also ask:

• What kinds of relationships will this intervention make possible?
• What behaviors, encounters, exclusions, or dependencies might it reinforce?
• What forms of intelligence will it incorporate, and which will it ignore?
• Can the intervention learn from its consequences?
• Can affected communities question or modify it?
• Can it be reversed if it causes harm?
• Does it preserve the capacity of the urban environment to evolve?
• Does it contribute to the coherence of the city as a whole, or merely optimize an isolated sector?
• Can the design adapt to continuous changes in its environment, relationships, and uses?

These questions shift design away from the production of finished objects and toward the care and responsible stewardship of evolutionary conditions.

The architect, planner, policymaker, technologist, or community organization does not control the city’s final trajectory. Each intervenes within a living field of relationships whose future cannot be fully predicted.

Design therefore becomes the responsible configuration of conditions for viable becoming.

Within URBION, this design position is expressed through the figure of the Architect of Conditions of Possibility. The task is not to impose a final form or predetermine every outcome of an intervention, but to configure spatial, material, technological, social, and institutional conditions within which projects and cities can learn, reorganize, and transform without losing coherence, plurality, or viability.

This conception shifts architecture away from the production of static objects and toward the responsible stewardship of evolutionary processes. At the same time, it extends beyond physical architecture to planning, governance, the economy, commerce, and decision-making, proposing relationships that are more distributed, informed by expert knowledge, democratically accountable, and ecologically viable. Its transformative capacity originates in situated interventions and can unfold across multiple scales, from the particular and the local toward urban, territorial, and global systems.

Design and planning are thus configured as open, flexible, and evolutionary processes: although a work may assume an initial state represented in drawings, its conception incorporates from the outset the possibility of reorganizing, adapting, and transforming through continuous interaction with its environment.

The same principle applies to resilience. In its classical formulation, resilience denotes a system’s capacity to absorb a disturbance and return to a previous state (Holling, 1973). Yet many urban crises reveal that the previous state was already unsustainable, unequal, fragile, or ecologically damaging.

Returning to normal may mean reproducing the conditions that caused the crisis.

URBION understands resilience not simply as recovery, but as coherent transformation under constraints. A resilient city must be capable of modifying its institutions, infrastructures, practices, material configurations, and technologies while preserving dignity, plurality, ecological responsibility, and organizational continuity.

It must be able to learn without becoming authoritarian, adapt without erasing memory, and innovate without turning every human interaction into a source of extractable data. The polycentric governance described by Ostrom (1990) offers a relevant institutional precedent: the viability of a shared system does not depend on a single center of control, but on rules that are verifiable, revisable, and distributed.

Resilience, therefore, does not consist in eliminating uncertainty. It consists in maintaining viability within it.

Within URBION, a conscious city is not an entity endowed with psychological consciousness, subjectivity, or a unified mind. The expression designates an emergent organizational and normative capacity: the ability of a heterogeneous urban formation to perceive relevant changes, learn from their consequences, coordinate diverse forms of intelligence, and orient its transformation within ethical and ecological limits.

Its condition can be evaluated qualitatively through five interconnected criteria:

• organizational coherence under transformation: the capacity to preserve identity and continuity without immobilizing its components;
• distributed learning: the incorporation of human, institutional, technical, material, and ecological knowledge without reducing it to a single logic;
• ethical admissibility and reversibility: transparency, auditability, meaningful oversight, and the effective possibility of correcting or withdrawing systems that cause harm;
• democratic contestability and accountability: the possibility of challenging decisions, distributing responsibilities, and preventing corporate, technocratic, or authoritarian capture;
• ecological viability and urban justice: compatibility with energy and metabolic limits, together with an equitable distribution of capabilities, benefits, and risks.

No criterion is sufficient in isolation. A city cannot be considered conscious because it possesses more data, automation, or predictive capacity, but because these conditions are continuously articulated throughout its becoming.

URBION is not presented as a totalizing metaphor or as a predetermined technological model. It is formulated as an open research program whose concepts must be operationalized, tested, and revised through urban studies, comparative analyses, and situated interventions. Its theoretical value will depend on its capacity to distinguish between transformations that strengthen a city’s coherence, legitimacy, and viability and those that, despite improving partial indicators, deepen its fragmentation.

In this sense, its propositions are deliberately falsifiable: they must make it possible to identify the conditions under which Heterogeneous Organizational Closure weakens, Symbiotic Urban Intelligence becomes concentrated or ethically inadmissible, and a transformation ceases to be ontogenetically viable.

Moving beyond the Smart City does not require abandoning data, artificial intelligence, sensing, digital twins, or urban technology. It requires situating them within a broader understanding of what a city is.

The city is not a neutral container into which intelligence is installed. Nor is it a machine awaiting better optimization. It is an evolving relational formation whose identity is continuously produced through interactions among human life, ecology, materiality, infrastructure, institutions, culture, and technology.

URBION proposes that the future of conscious cities depends on recognizing and governing this process of becoming.

In light of these criteria, a conscious city should not be defined by how much it knows, how quickly it responds, or how completely it can predict its inhabitants. It should be evaluated by its capacity to sustain meaningful relationships, incorporate different forms of knowledge, preserve rights and plurality, remain ecologically viable, learn from disturbances, and transform without losing organizational coherence.

The decisive transition is therefore:

• from optimization to viability;
• from centralized intelligence to distributed symbiosis;
• from technological responsiveness to ethical admissibility;
• from finished form to continuous becoming;
• and from the city as a managed object to the city as a heterogeneous urban organism.

The city begins where fragmentation ends.

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Wohllk, R. (2026). URBION — Urban Ontogenesis for conscious cities: Beyond the Smart City paradigm, toward the city as an urban organism in becoming. The Centre for Conscious Design.

Roger Wohllk is an architect and urban planner educated at the Universidad de Chile, and an MSc candidate in Artificial Intelligence at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez. He has more than twenty-five years of professional experience in architecture, urban design, planning, and project development. He is the founder of Studio A Otra Escala and CEO of Consultora Australis Innovación.

His work lies at the intersection of urban theory, artificial intelligence, complex systems, technology, and ethics. In 2026, he formulated URBION: Urban Ontogenesis, a new urban paradigm and open research program that seeks to move beyond the Smart City, Cognitive City, and Responsive City models. URBION understands the city as an urban organism in becoming, characterized by Heterogeneous Organizational Closure, and introduces Symbiotic Urban Intelligence as a distributed capacity for perception, interpretation, learning, evaluation, and coordination.

Throughout his career, he has delivered numerous lectures and conference presentations in Chile and internationally on architecture, urbanism, artificial intelligence, innovation, technology, and urban transformation. Notably, he spoke at the Conscious Cities Festival 2025 in Lima, where he presented “From Smart City to Cognitive City”. His practice and research are articulated through the figure of the Architect of Conditions of Possibility, oriented toward reconfiguring design and the conditions within which projects and cities can learn, reorganize, and transform without losing coherence, plurality, or viability.