Yes, the fault might be our current project on PowerBI, but this month I’ve been reasoning a lot around our Illuministic obsession over measurements and how that affects our approach to business intelligence in the era of Big Data. On top of this, I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot. Also, I’m getting old and maybe this means I’m getting (more) romantic.
“The emperor is he who listens to the tales of his envoys and reassembles the puzzle of his dominion in his mind’s eye. But Marco Polo spoke of cities that did not fit any puzzle.”
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
There is an empire that dreams of order. In this empire, maps stretch their grids across the land like nets cast over waves, hoping to still the undulant flow of life into fixed shapes. Tables are filled with numbers. Diagrams replace gestures. The city is no longer a story—it is a spreadsheet. And in the centre of this empire, a ruler waits, not for poetry, but for precision.
There is a kind of empire that measures itself not in land but in legibility. Its dominion is made of graphs, maps, metrics—where meaning is a function of clarity, and clarity a function of control. In this empire, the city must be surveyed, indexed, optimised. Every corner known, every flow anticipated. The cartographers bring measurements; the engineers, models. And that’s why Calvino’s Marco Polo is entertaining the emperor with stories of cities that aren’t mapped, like a Šahrāzād to his Šahryār, in the psychoanalytic intent of bringing a concept home.
He does not speak of borders or growth. He speaks of cities suspended in air, cities remembered only in dreams, cities unravelling like thread, cities built from silence and sorrow. He does not offer coordinates. He speaks instead of cities where memory is etched in layers of forgetting, where desires tangle in streetlights and silences. Cities suspended on stilts, cities built from the pattern of dreams, cities that are not so much places as states of being. Cities that refuse to be useful. He speaks, and the ruler listens, both enthralled and unsettled. For these cities do not fit the empire’s ledgers.
Marco Polo’s stories disarm Kublai Khan because they undermine the very idea that knowledge is equivalent to mastery. The Khan wants a world that can be grasped, arranged. He wants reports, models, proofs. Polo offers only fragments—unreliable, poetic, unrepeatable. A different kind of knowledge. One that resists capture.
“It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”
— Invisible Cities, Chapter 9
We live now in a world that increasingly resembles Kublai Khan’s imagined empire—a world entranced by the measurable. Our cities are rated, our movements tracked, our knowledge quantified, our value indexed. In architecture, education, and even in the deepest chambers of culture, we are taught to believe that what matters can be counted, and what cannot be counted does not matter. We are inspired by Khan’s dream of precision. Education systems reduce learning to standardised metrics. Architecture bends toward performativity, reducing spatial experience to quantifiable outputs. Digital culture demands legibility at every turn—attention tracked, engagement scored, creativity algorithmically ranked.
But what happens to all that escapes these systems? To the intuition that precedes comprehension, the warmth of a space that cannot be diagrammed, the knowledge acquired through detours, accidents, reverie? We grazed the surface of this unease a few weeks ago, with my article on qualitative KPIs and some heated discussions that followed in private. Some of you reacted with near indignation—as if I had invented the concept. Which, of course, I didn’t.
This reflection springs from those sour words and begins with a suspicion: that in our data-driven fervour to make everything countable, we may be silencing the very dimensions of thought and life that count the most. And it begins with a proposition: that we learn, with Polo, to speak of cities not as systems, but as mysteries. Not to master them, but to dwell within them.
1. The Ghost in the Grid: Calvino and the Poetics of the Immeasurable
Calvino’s Invisible Cities is often framed as a meditation on urbanism, but I think this label misrepresents its ambition. The book is not an architectural dissertation but a cognitive labyrinth—less about cities than about how we think, describe, and fail to systematise experience, which is why I also mentioned it last month while talking about the architecture of memory.
Each of Marco Polo’s tales resists spatial logic and narrative linearity; the cities he evokes are not places to be planned or lived in, but metaphors that collapse under scrutiny and reassemble as paradox. They are epistemological devices, each city a trapdoor to a form of knowledge that cannot be diagrammed. These cities flicker at the margins of meaning—coherent enough to provoke reflection, yet evasive enough to resist classification. In this way, Invisible Cities becomes not a catalogue of possible worlds but a formal critique of measurability itself: a lattice of fragments that defies both optimisation and closure.
Consider Zobeide, a city founded by a failure. Men, haunted by an identical dream of a woman fleeing through unknown streets, build a city to recapture her. But once the streets are laid, she never returns. The dream fails to repeat itself. And so the city remains: not as fulfilment, but as residue.
“This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again.”
Zobeide is the negative space of desire—a map of absence. It cannot be instrumentalised, because its reason for existing no longer exists. It endures only because of what is missing.
Or take Baucis, the city suspended on stilts high above the ground. From the earth, it looks like scaffolding. The inhabitants—distant, airy, abstract—descend only by rope ladders and retractable baskets. The city itself is not described, only glimpsed. Its presence is eclipsed by its distance. It is there, and not there. Measurable, perhaps, in height—but not in meaning.
And then Thekla: the city eternally under construction. No one sees Thekla complete, much like some construction projects here in Milan. To ask for its finished form is to miss the point entirely. Maybe that’s also the spirit of Gioia 22.
“What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?”
“We will show it to you as soon as the work is finished.”
But we know it never will be.
These cities form a triad of resistance against what Calvino elsewhere called “the inferno of the living”—a world where every space must serve a function, every object a purpose, every citizen a role. In Zobeide, Baucis, and Thekla, meaning is not delivered by instruction but conjured in the reader’s act of imagining. They are not meant to be interpreted. They are meant to be dwelt in, as uncertainties.
This is what makes Invisible Cities so difficult to co-opt into frameworks like urban planning or design thinking: it does not offer prototypes, only parables. It whispers of a knowledge that is unsteady, a logic that disintegrates under scrutiny, and yet it does not dwell in aesthetics as the regular enemy of functionality. In a time when architecture increasingly pushes towards data-driven logic, and cities have the ambition to behave like machines, Calvino reminds us that a building might serve a function but the city lives with its people and is shaped by their narrative—as failure, as dream, as question. And maybe that is the only kind of city worth building.
But I digress.
2. Trading Meaning for Metrics: how we’re trained to ignore
Since the earlier stages of our education, we are taught to see what we are told is important—and to ignore what cannot be named, measured, or monetised. Another concept Calvino plays around with his whimsical Marcovaldo. This is the foundational training of life in datafied systems. What escapes capture is deemed irrelevant, ineffable, or—at best—a nice-to-have. Meaning becomes synonymous with visibility, and visibility is granted only to what aligns with pre-approved value frameworks.
Nowhere is this clearer than in how we evaluate the success of our work. Projects are filtered through KPIs, dashboards, and quantified benchmarks. We build spaces, products, lessons, and strategies, and then we ask: How many? How fast? How often? But rarely: How meaningful? How transformative? How invisible-yet-necessary?
This filtering mechanism finds its most vivid allegory in China Miéville’s The City & the City, a novel that stages two cities—Besźel and Ul Qoma—overlapping in the same geographic space, yet rendered separate by an act of “cultural discipline”. Citizens are trained to unsee the other city, to navigate shared terrain without acknowledging what is right in front of them. To notice the wrong things is to breach. Questioning the rules leads to removal from urban life.
Miéville’s conceit is fiction, and his focus certainly isn’t my trifling with digital concepts, but its logic is not unfamiliar. We, too, are conditioned to unsee in our disciplines: to disregard ambiguity, to undervalue soft outcomes, to ignore, to overlook the quiet systems that do not announce themselves in charts. This selective blindness is not an accident—it is the result of a long Enlightenment inheritance, a rationalist dream where the only knowledge that matters is that which can be made explicit. Which is fine up to a point—I’m no occultist—but one thing is to demand rationality and another thing altogether is being irrationally afraid of what looks too difficult to measure.
To stay in the realm of science fiction, N.K. Jemisin’s “Great Cities” Duology—The City We Became and The World We Make—offers a reversal of this pattern. In her vision, cities are sentient, embodied by avatars whose existence depends on the city’s collective memory, culture, and struggle. These urban entities do not emerge from blueprints—they are born of story, trauma, rhythm, resistance. They are quite literally powered by what a city means to its people. And in this sense, they point us toward a more generous epistemology—one where value is emergent, complex, and irreducibly lived.
If we borrow Jemisin’s lens, we must then ask: what in our own projects have we been trained to unsee? What narratives have been flattened into deliverables, what relationships transformed into transactions, what places stripped of their affective charge in favour of performance indicators?
As it’ll be clear to those who know me, this is not a call to abandon measurement. It is yet another invitation to rethink what we choose to measure, and why. To acknowledge that legibility is not the same as insight. That usefulness is not always immediate. That some of the most valuable dimensions of a project—trust, participation, beauty, doubt, delight—exist outside of quantification, but are no less real for it.
So here we again to ask the same question: what if metrics could be porous, qualitative, even narrative? What if evaluation began with listening, not counting? What if part of our responsibility as practitioners was to develop instruments that detect the murmurings beneath the noise? In a world increasingly governed by what is seen and sorted, this kind of seeing—attuned, critical, imperfect—might be the most radical act of all. The good news? It’s all possible.
3. Utopian Blueprints and Measured Dreams
Before data dashboards, there were cosmological diagrams. Schematics of harmony. Cities imagined not as settlements but as expressions of a universal order that was as parametric as my student’s windows from two weeks ago. One of the most vivid of these is Tommaso Campanella’s La Città del Sole, a 17th-century utopia built not of stone but of knowledge. In Campanella’s vision, the city is structured around concentric walls, each inscribed with visual knowledge: astronomy, botany, history, mathematics. The inhabitants do not just live in the city—they learn from it. The architecture itself becomes education.
Campanella’s model is seductive in its clarity. Everything has its place. Knowledge is visible, universal, accessible. But beneath this harmony lies a troubling question: Who decides what is worth knowing—and therefore worth inscribing on the walls? What remains outside this canon of enlightenment? What forms of knowledge resist visualisation entirely?
This question echoes into the present, of course. We still crave diagrams of perfect organisation, only now they come dressed as performance indicators, smart city matrices, or user analytics, but the promise is the same: a world rendered knowable, and thus governable, through structure.
Yet even Campanella, writing at the height of the rationalist dream, knew that knowledge must be embodied, shared, and lived. His city was not just a diagram—it was a community. And herein lies a seed for an alternative: what if our frameworks for evaluation were not imposed from above, but constructed collectively, through experience?
Participatory design and co-creation methodologies offer us some tools for this shift. Do you remember them? I did a whole Autodesk University class around them last year. These are not new practices, but they remain undervalued in metrics-obsessed cultures because they don’t always produce easily comparable data. Instead, they generate what philosopher Donna Haraway might call situated knowledge—local, partial, and deeply embedded in context. In participatory evaluation, value is not abstracted from the process—it is the process.
Consider an architectural project evaluated not by post-occupancy energy scores alone, but by how well it adapts to the evolving needs of its users over time. Or an educational programme assessed not only through completion rates, but through the transformative questions it enables learners to ask. These are not vague ideals—they are alternative metrics, grounded in lived interaction, reflexivity, and trust.
We might think of these metrics as relational rather than extractive. They emerge through dialogue, not from dashboards alone. They take longer to establish and resist standardisation—but they are no less rigorous. In fact, their very resistance to flattening is what makes them powerful.
If Campanella imagined a space where knowledge and life were inseparable, taking that proposition seriously leads us to translate its spirit—to create evaluative systems that do not silence the immeasurable, but make space for it. This is not a utopia. It is a viable practice.
4. Buildings of Smoke and Time: Architectural Knowledge and Its Shadows
Architectural design has always occupied a liminal space—caught between the measurable and the felt, between what is drawn and what is lived. It trades in dimensions, materials, and regulations, but also in memory, intuition, and atmosphere. It promises permanence while shaped by time, culture, decay. Perhaps more than any other discipline, it reveals the limits of a purely quantitative approach and the dangers of a purely aesthetic one. Because architecture does not end at the linework—it begins when someone steps into it.
And yet, as design becomes more enmeshed with data, simulation, and performance analytics, it increasingly aims at solving our inefficiency through rewarding what can be modelled: thermal comfort, circulation, light diffusion, carbon counts. These are vital metrics. But they are not the whole city. The danger is not in the tools themselves, but in the assumption that what cannot be computed—because of our inability to fathom computing the qualitative—does not count. In such a landscape, the immeasurable becomes a kind of ghost—present but unacknowledged.
This spectral quality is echoed in Brian Aldiss’s The Malacia Tapestry, which depicts a city where time is forbidden to advance. Innovation is taboo. Buildings must replicate the styles of the past. But under the polished surfaces, everything is restless—characters ache for change, truth, expression. The city becomes a beautifully regulated prison, where form triumphs over experience. Aldiss’s fictional Malacia reminds us what happens when design suppresses dynamism: we get monuments to control, not containers for life.
Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, meanwhile, offers a hallucinatory vision of time as a spatial phenomenon, through a clever crafting of time travel as a narrative device. Its characters wander through 19th-century London, where memory and myth twist the streets into something unstable, folding the past into the present. The city is no longer a backdrop—it becomes a shifting protagonist and, in this, Powers gestures toward something architects often intuit but struggle to prove: that space holds memory, that buildings store emotion, that cities are temporal instruments as much as physical ones.
What would it mean, then, to design not only for efficiency or compliance, but for these shadowed dimensions of experience? For the emotional residue of a corridor, the psychic threshold of a staircase, the sociopolitical choreography of a plaza? These are not ineffable qualities. They are simply resistant to reduction. And as such, they call for new evaluative tools.
In some cases, these tools already exist: participatory post-occupancy evaluations, ethnographic methods, embodied mapping, and narrative walkthroughs. In others, they must be invented—hybrid approaches that combine sensor data with user diaries as it was done years ago in the entertainment field, building logbooks with observations on how people actually interact with the built environment during a trial stage. What matters is not perfect accuracy, but interpretive generosity.
Architecture has always existed at the crossroads of precision and ambiguity. A plan may be dimensioned to the millimetre, but its interpretation—once constructed and inhabited—takes on a life of its own. You can model airflow, predict daylight, and simulate foot traffic, but you cannot quantify the feeling of crossing a threshold, the warmth of filtered morning light, or the informal rituals that emerge around a kitchen counter.
Or can you?
We can try.
What we need is an expanded evaluative toolkit—one that respects the measurable while giving space to the ineffable. That listens as much as it logs. That records experience, not just efficiency. Below are some approaches—some already in use, others emerging—that move us closer to this broader architecture of understanding.
Here’s a set of practical tools to bring our goal home.
1. Participatory Post-Occupancy Evaluations
We can call it PPOE: it all sounds more reliable with an acronym.
Beyond sensors and spreadsheets, participatory Post-Occupancy Evaluations invite building users to reflect on their lived experience. Rather than asking only “Is the room too warm?”, they might ask:
- Do you feel comfortable and welcome here?
- How has your behaviour changed since moving into this space?
- Where do conversations naturally happen? Where do they die?
Imagine this applied to an office.
Tools to bring this home might include:
- Open-ended surveys;
- Walking interviews where users narrate their experience as they move through space;
- Participatory mapping, where users mark areas of comfort, stress, memory, or use.
These methods can reveal spatial patterns invisible to traditional evaluation: desire paths, zones of appropriation, or sites of emotional tension. The result isn’t a heatmap—it’s a map of affect.
2. Ethnographic and Narrative Walkthroughs
Borrowing from anthropology, this method treats the building as a cultural text. Researchers embed themselves in the context, observe behaviours, document rituals, and—most importantly—listen.
Possible applications:
- In a co-housing project, for instance, residents might co-create a timeline of shared meals, noting how seasonal changes, light, and even acoustics influence participation.
- In a school, students could document where they choose to sit and why, revealing power structures or inclusivity gaps not visible in the floor plan.
These stories often destabilize the architect’s original assumptions—revealing that the success of a space lies not in its intended function but in its interpreted one, and might create a layer of knowledge to inform renovations or simply to make our projects better.
3. Embodied Mapping and Sensorial Diaries
Where most spatial metrics abstract the user from the data, embodied methods reinsert them.
Examples:
- Asking users to record moments when they feel disoriented, inspired, or calm while walking through a space or saying into a room;
- Mapping routes with sensory notations: light, noise, smell, tactility;
- Documenting how posture, gait, or breathing changes across spatial thresholds.
This method is particularly relevant for health care, learning environments, communication infrastructure, and workplaces—where stress, comfort, and agency deeply affect user outcomes but often go unmeasured.
4. Hybrid Metrics: Sensor Data + User Diaries
To step things up—since we haven’t invented anything so far—imagine combining real-time environmental metrics (temperature, CO₂, occupancy) with user-submitted qualitative data (journals, voice notes, drawings). A meeting room might register low occupancy—but diaries reveal that it’s avoided because the acoustics create anxiety. Or a well-used stairwell, flagged as inefficient by traffic models, might emerge as a social spine—its pauses and crossings crucial for spontaneous collaboration.
These hybrid systems are not about validating feeling through data—but about creating dialogue between the qualitative and the quantitative. Between what the model sees and what the user experiences.
5. The Living Logbook: Temporal Feedback
Finally, we must treat buildings as temporal artefacts. Post-occupancy evaluation must not be a one-off snapshot, but a living process, like a logbook or ship’s journal. Over time, this logbook would record shifts in use, anomalies, anecdotes, complaints, reinterpretations.
- In housing: how has the threshold changed from transition zone to social buffer?
- In a library: what new patterns of quiet and congregation have emerged?
- In public space: when did the fountain stop being a fountain and become a stage?
This is not nostalgia. It is operational memory — the kind that helps future designers anticipate, learn, and adapt. What is your Digital Twin recording? What’s it monitoring?
These methods don’t ask us to abandon rigour. They ask us to expand it. To build structures of evaluation that are as layered, contradictory, and alive as the spaces we inhabit.
As Calvino might remind us: a city is not its walls, nor its streets, but the stories we tell within it.
Bookish References:
- Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino;
- La città del Sole (The City of the Sun) by Tommaso Campanella;
- The Great Cities Duology by N.K. Jemisin, comprised of The City We Became and The World We Make;
- The City & the City by China Miéville;
- The Malacia Tapestry by Brian Aldiss;
- The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.
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