This ten-year forecast map, The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion, charts the important intersections between urbanization and digitalization that will shape this global urban experiment, and the key tensions that will arise.

The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure.

VURB is a European framework for policy and design research concerning urban computational systems. The VURB foundation, based in Amsterdam, provides direction and resources to a portfolio of projects investigating how our cultures might come to use networked digital resources to change the way we understand, build, and inhabit cities.

Cities can be viewed as information architecture systems. Here, "architecture" is used in the sense of computer architecture -- it refers not to the design of buildings, but to how the components of a complex system interact.