  Two unavoidable processes punctuate our century: The unprecedented
urbanisation of our planet (United Nations, 2014) and the spread of ubiquitous
computing (Weiser, 1991) and urban data streams. This process of urbanisation
corresponds with the process of digitalisation of urban life: while
urbanisation acts on a physical infrastructural level, the digital develops as
a kind of metastructure above the infrastructure. This metastructural level
offers a flexible framework through which information is continuously and
operatively being symbolized. Today, Information technology and the
availability of abundant urban data streams could be considered as forerunners
of our time, having unprecedented impacts comparable to the ones brought by the
steam engine at the dawn of industrialisation and the electrification of
cities. It is therefore no longer conceivable to think of the physical
structure of the city without including its digital counterpart. Against this
background, we will explore the role of computational power and information
technologies as dominant factors in the formation of computational urban models
and normative city theories. We will show how these models and theories,
emerging mainly during the 19th and 20th centuries, present leaping
correspondences with more ancient conceptions of the city, when observed from a
meta-level or episteme (Foucault, 2002) approach. First, and for the sake of
clarity, we will deal with some methodological elucidations around the concepts
of theory, model and episteme, and how we will refer conceptually to these
terms throughout this paper. Secondly, we will review these evolving
technological and computational levels of abstraction and their influence on
the different conceptions of the city. Thirdly, we will develop the hypothesis
of a conceptual gap, between our current technological capacity -- grounded on
the abundance and availability of urban data streams -- and the state of the
art in urban modelling and city theory. Lastly, building upon Foucault's
concept of episteme (Foucault, 1970) and genealogy (Foucault, 1977b), we will
explore this gap by speculating around the possibility of an inversion in
computational urban modelling and city theory. And above all, we will question
the terms in which we can think of the city, in an age where the world can be
virtually conceived as fully urban, and the continuity and abundance of urban
data streams giving account of it can be taken for granted. How are we
articulating the phenomena we call city on top of this generic common ground?
