Artificially Intelligent Cities: Algorithmic Control Negotiated by Human Unreason Part 2 Dissertation 2026 Josua Hefti Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture Paris | France Every day the built environment becomes more monitored, more automated, more responsive, and more controlled. Digital technologies are diffusing into cities, streets, and homes. Networked devices colonize urban spaces. They sense, reason, and act, turning the city into an automated system. Today, this effort is largely done by private institutional actors under the pretense of “smart” or “cognitive” cities.Institutional “smart” cities weaponize urban technology. Sensing becomes hidden surveillance, reasoning becomes algorithmic prediction, and acting becomes spatial control. They reduce the human to a behavioral profile—constantly monitored, preempted, and manipulated. The resulting condition contradicts the city as a stage for liberty, equality, and fraternity—values now replaced by the technocratic ideals of comfort, security, and sustainability. It eliminates the unpredictability of complex human nature that defines public life and constructs a frictionless and automated experience.The dissertation investigates the power of urban networks and demands an ideological reversal. It accepts the inevitable intrusion of technology and uses it as a support for spatial negotiation guided by three core principles: participation, transparency, and friction. The dissertation introduces the “reversed cyborg”, an augmentation of computational infrastructures by human peculiarity; dreams, unreason, and desires.The resulting framework presents an alternative for future cities. It preserves the citizen as the protagonist of the urban narrative, resisting a reduction to a data source. It uses urban technology to support collective negotiation as a core necessity of democratic cities. The goal is to ensure that shared environments remain fundamentally human: contested, unpredictable, and alive. Tutor(s) Nicholas Hannequin