scale can maintain its own integrity to a larger degree than the bacterial colony [58]. Thus, it can be argued that the organism is more autonomous than the colony at the multicellular scale. If we are interested on deciding “how living” urban technology is, we have to measure how much an urban system is able to produce its own information, which reflects its organization and thus control over its own dynamics, at the urban scale . Different urban systems can be composed by the same living and non living components, e.g. traffic (drivers, pedestrians, vehicles, traffic lights, etc.). But different organizations of the urban system, e.g. traffic light coordination methods, will deliver different informational measures for the system, which will reflect their abilities to adapt, learn, evolve, and self-repair. For each urban system, if we increase its “liveness” with living technology, the system will be able to deliver a better performance in comparison with a system without the properties of living systems. 3 Solutions for Urban Problems Cities have been described metaphorically as organisms, e.g. [35, 121]: they grow, have a metabolism, an internal organization, transportation networks of matter, energy, and infor- mation, and telecommunications have been characterized as “nervous systems”. Urban areas also reproduce and repair themselves, although their mechanisms are more akin to grasses than animals. Even thermodynamically, cities take matter, energy and information from their environment, transform them, and produce waste to maintain their organization, just like living systems. However, Lynch [92] argued that descriptions of modern cities as living organisms or as machines are inadequate, even when they contain all twenty subsystems required by living systems, as defined by Miller [96]. Still, the promise of living technology towards improving urban systems and thus transforming the nature of cities was not yet considered three decades ago. Moreover, Batty [17] has recently argued that the scientific study of cities is transitioning “from thinking of ‘cities as machines’ to ‘cities as organisms’”. 6