Once we built the walls, now they shape us. As artificial intelligence transforms cities, the ancient human connection with space is being shaken. But is this transformation really for us? Or are algorithms building their own civilization?
Quiet City, Noisy Mind
A scene from the near future: Autumn morning, a gray sky shines with an artificial blue on the glass surfaces of skyscrapers.
Your home wakes up with a smart system; the coffee machine adjusts the temperature according to your heart rhythm. No need to go to the office – the boardroom has already deduced from your facial expression that “today is going to be a stressful day”.
The city is breathing, but this breath is not ours.
Walls listen, elevators learn, lights recognize you.
As artificial intelligence “smartens” cities, we are unwittingly mortgaging our privacy.
This may seem like a step towards the most perfect system in human history, but it carries with it an invisible loneliness.
Living with Algorithms
Today’s big cities – New York, Istanbul, Paris, Tokyo… – are no longer just people, but living organisms full of data.
Smart traffic systems, facial recognition cameras, energy sensors, even home robots that plan your morning routine…
It all seems to be there for our comfort, but after a while you realize:
The city learns about you and you don’t know the city.
Artificial Intelligence Architecture: Code Under the Concrete
Architecture offices no longer produce projects without the support of artificial intelligence. Thanks to tools such as Rhino, Grasshopper and Midjourney, buildings rise not with human imagination but with
Individuality is quietly sacrificed for efficiency.
The “smart city,” in fact, is the utopia of the standard man.
In a culturally diverse country like Turkey, this is a serious danger. Because artificial intelligence likes the average, but we are not average. Cultural textures, neighborhood habits, even street noise have their own rhythm. This rhythm does not fit into the data, but the silence of the data may one day swallow everything.
Walls of Data
Today, our homes, offices and even schools are data centers. Heat sensors, camera systems, smart locks, location tracking modules… They all promise comfort, but they actually create layers of surveillance. Moreover, this surveillance is not conducted by an authority, but by a silent system. While we say “Artificial intelligence increases our security”, we leave our own behavioral architecture in the lap of the system. When you look at the data flow behind an architectural drawing, you realize this:
We don’t design the walls, the walls design us.
Erosion between Man and Space
Once upon a time, the term “smart building” represented a technological luxury. Today, these buildings have become
I ask you:
When a house is so familiar to you, is it still your home? Or is it a laboratory?
Turkey’s Intersection Point: Smart City, Fragile Human
Turkey is in the middle of this transformation. On the one hand, metropolises that renew their technological infrastructure; on the other hand, towns that are still unprepared for digitalization… This dichotomy shows how artificial intelligence-supported architecture can create an identity gap for us.
An Istanbul apartment building can now be as smart as a building in Tokyo – but never as complex as Istanbul. Because here, space is not just walls; it is memory, tradition, smell, sound. Artificial intelligence cannot measure these things. And what it cannot measure, it deletes as “useless data”.
Conclusion Walls Have Memory
Artificial intelligence has given us something incredible: living buildings, thinking cities. But it has also turned our emotions into codes without us realizing it. Neighborhood conversations have fallen silent; city noises have blended into the statistics of algorithms.
I sometimes think:
One day, drones soaring over the Bosphorus will be telling each other “the weather is beautiful today” and we will still be silent.
