The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Des Fitzgerald: “Cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks. So goes the argument. But is it true? What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there?

Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in deepest Wales, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings. Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today’s green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are – in all their raucous, constructed and artificial glory…(More)”.

A tale of two cities: one real, one virtual

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joy Lo Dico in the Financial Times: “In recent years, digital city-building has become a legitimate part of urban planning. Barcelona, Cambridge and Helsinki are among a number of European cities exploring how copies of themselves could prove useful in making their built environments sharper, faster, cleaner and greener.

What exists in real life is being rendered a second time in the digital space: creating a library of the past, an eagle’s-eye view of the present and, potentially, a vision of the future.

One of the most striking projects has been happening in Ukraine, where technology company Skeiron has, since 2022, been mapping the country’s monuments, under threat from bombing.

The project #SaveUkrainianHeritage has recorded 60 buildings, from the St Sofia Cathedral in Kyiv and the Chernivtsi National University — both Unesco world heritage sites — to wooden churches across the country, something Skeiron’s co-founder Yurii Prepodobnyi mentions with pride. There are thousands of them. “Some are only 20 or 30 square metres,” he says. “But Ukrainian churches keep Ukrainian identity.”

With laser measurements, drone photography and photogrammetry — the art of stitching photographs together — Prepodobnyi and his team can produce highly detailed 3D models.

They have even managed to recreate the exterior of the Mariupol drama theatre, destroyed in the early days of the Ukraine war, after calling for photographs and drone footage.

Another project, in Pompeii, has been using similar digital techniques to capture the evolution of excavations into a 3D model. The Pompeii I. 14 Project, led by Tulane University and Indiana State University, takes the process of excavating buildings within one block of Pompeii, Insula 14, and turns it into a digital representation. Using laser measurements, iPad Pros, a consumer drone and handheld cameras, a space can be measured to within a couple of millimetres. What is relayed back along the stream is a visual record of how a room changes over thousands of years, as the debris, volcanic eruption and layers of life that went before are revealed…(More)”.

Privacy and the City: How Data Shapes City Identities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bilyana Petkova: “This article bridges comparative constitutional law to research inspired by city leadership and the opportunities that technology brings to the urban environment. It looks first to some of the causes of rapid urbanization and finds them in the pitfalls of antidiscrimination law in federations and quasi-federations such as the United States and the European Union. Short of achieving antidiscrimination based on nationality, the EU has experimented with data privacy as an identity clause that could bring social cohesion the same way purportedly freedom of speech has done in the US. In the City however, diversity replaces antidiscrimination, making cities attractive to migrants across various walks of life. The consequence for federalism is the obvious decline of top-down or vertical, state-based federalism and the rise of legal urbanism whereby cities establish loose networks of cooperation between themselves. These types of arrangements are not yet a threat to the State or the EU but might become such if cities are increasingly isolated from the political process (e.g. at the EU level) and lack legal means to assert themselves in court. City diversity and openness to different cultures in turn invites a connection to new technologies since unlike antidiscrimination that is usually strictly examined on a case-by-case level, diversity can be more readily computed. Finally, the article focuses on NYC and London initiatives to suggest a futuristic vision of city networks that instead of using social credit score like in China, deploy data trusts to populate their urban environments, shape city identities and exchange ideas for urban development…(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence and the City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Federico Cugurullo, Federico Caprotti, Matthew Cook, Andrew Karvonen, Pauline McGuirk, and Simon Marvin: “This book explores in theory and practice how artificial intelligence (AI) intersects with and alters the city. Drawing upon a range of urban disciplines and case studies, the chapters reveal the multitude of repercussions that AI is having on urban society, urban infrastructure, urban governance, urban planning and urban sustainability.

Contributors also examine how the city, far from being a passive recipient of new technologies, is influencing and reframing AI through subtle processes of co-constitution. The book advances three main contributions and arguments:

  • First, it provides empirical evidence of the emergence of a post-smart trajectory for cities in which new material and decision-making capabilities are being assembled through multiple AIs.
  • Second, it stresses the importance of understanding the mutually constitutive relations between the new experiences enabled by AI technology and the urban context.
  • Third, it engages with the concepts required to clarify the opaque relations that exist between AI and the city, as well as how to make sense of these relations from a theoretical perspective…(More)”.

Open data ecosystems: what models to co-create service innovations in smart cities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Arthur Sarazin: “While smart cities are recently providing open data, how to organise the collective creation of data, knowledge and related products and services produced from this collective resource, still remains to be thought. This paper aims at gathering the literature review on open data ecosystems to tackle the following research question: what models can be imagined to stimulate the collective co-creation of services between smart cities’ stakeholders acting as providers and users of open data? Such issue is currently at stake in many municipalities such as Lisbon which decided to position itself as a platform (O’Reilly, 2010) in the local digital ecosystem. With the implementation of its City Operation Center (COI), Lisbon’s municipality provides an Information Infrastructure (Bowker et al., 2009) to many different types of actors such as telecom companies, municipalities, energy utilities or transport companies. Through this infrastructure, Lisbon encourages such actors to gather, integrate and release heterogeneous datasets and tries to orchestrate synergies among them so data-driven solution to urban problems can emerge (Carvalho and Vale, 2018). The remaining question being: what models for the municipalities such as Lisbon to lean on so as to drive this cutting-edge type of service innovation?…(More)”.

Urban Artificial Intelligence: From Real-world Observations to a Paradigm-Shifting Concept

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Hubert Beroche: “Cities are facing unprecedented challenges. The figures are well known: while occupying only 2% of the earth’s surface, urban settlements host more than 50% of the global population and are responsible for 70% of greenhouse emissions. While concentrating most capital and human wealth, they are also places of systemic inequalities (Nelson, 2023), exacerbating and materializing social imbalances. In the meantime, cities have fewer and fewer resources to face those tensions. Increasing environmental constraints, combined with shrinking public budgets, are putting pressure on cities’ capacities. More than ever, urban stakeholders have to do more with less.

In this context, Artificial Intelligence has usually been seen as a much-welcomed technology. This technology can be defined as machines’ ability to perform cognitive functions, mainly through learning algorithms since 2012. First embedded in heavy top-down Smart City projects, AI applications in cities have gradually proliferated under the impetus of various stakeholders. Today’s cities are home to numerous AIs, owned and used by multiple stakeholders to serve different, sometimes divergent, interests.

The diversity of urban AIs in cities is well illustrated in our project co-produced with Cornell Tech: “The Future of Urban AI”. This graph represents different urban AI trends based on The Future of UrbanTech Horizon Scan. Each colored dot represents a major urban tech/urban AI trend, with its ramifications. Some of these trends are opposed but still cohabiting (eg “Dark Plans” and “New Screen Deal”)…(More)”.

Public Value of Data: B2G data-sharing Within the Data Ecosystem of Helsinki

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Vera Djakonoff: “Datafication penetrates all levels of society. In order to harness public value from an expanding pool of private-produced data, there has been growing interest in facilitating business-to-government (B2G) data-sharing. This research examines the development of B2G data-sharing within the data ecosystem of the City of Helsinki. The research has identified expectations ecosystem actors have for B2G data-sharing and factors that influence the city’s ability to unlock public value from private-produced data.

The research context is smart cities, with a specific focus on the City of Helsinki. Smart cities are in an advantageous position to develop novel public-private collaborations. Helsinki, on the international stage, stands out as a pioneer in the realm of data-driven smart city development. For this research, nine data ecosystem actors representing the city and companies participated in semi-structured thematic interviews through which their perceptions and experiences were mapped.

The theoretical framework of this research draws from the public value management (PVM) approach in examining the smart city data ecosystem and alignment of diverse interests for a shared purpose. Additionally, the research transcends the examination of the interests in isolation and looks at how technological artefacts shape the social context and interests surrounding them. Here, the focus is on the properties of data as an artefact with anti-rival value-generation potential.

The findings of this research reveal that while ecosystem actors recognise that more value can be drawn from data through collaboration, this is not apparent at the level of individual initiatives and transactions. This research shows that the city’s commitment to and facilitation of a long-term shared sense of direction and purpose among ecosystem actors is central to developing B2G data-sharing for public value outcomes. Here, participatory experimentation is key, promoting an understanding of the value of data and rendering visible the diverse motivations and concerns of ecosystem actors, enabling learning for wise, data-driven development…(More)”.

New York City Takes Aim at AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Samuel Greengard: “As concerns over artificial intelligence (AI) grow and angst about its potential impact increase, political leaders and government agencies are taking notice. In November, U.S. president Joe Biden issued an executive order designed to build guardrails around the technology. Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) is currently developing a legal framework around responsible AI.

Yet, what is often overlooked about artificial intelligence is that it’s more likely to impact people on a local level. AI touches housing, transportation, healthcare, policing and numerous other areas relating to business and daily life. It increasingly affects citizens, government employees, and businesses in both obvious and unintended ways.

One city attempting to position itself at the vanguard of AI is New York. In October 2023, New York City announced a blueprint for developing, managing, and using the technology responsibly. The New York City Artificial Intelligence Action Plan—the first of its kind in the U.S.—is designed to help officials and the public navigate the AI space.

“It’s a fairly comprehensive plan that addresses both the use of AI within city government and the responsible use of the technology,” says Clifford S. Stein, Wai T. Chang Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and Interim Director of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University.

Adds Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder and chief research and development officer at The GovLab and Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), “AI localism focuses on the idea that cities are where most of the action is in regard to AI.”…(More)”.

Boston experimented with using generative AI for governing. It went surprisingly well

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Santiago Garces and Stephen Goldsmith: “…we see the possible advances of generative AI as having the most potential. For example, Boston asked OpenAI to “suggest interesting analyses” after we uploaded 311 data. In response, it suggested two things: time series analysis by case time, and a comparative analysis by neighborhood. This meant that city officials spent less time navigating the mechanics of computing an analysis, and had more time to dive into the patterns of discrepancy in service. The tools make graphs, maps, and other visualizations with a simple prompt. With lower barriers to analyze data, our city officials can formulate more hypotheses and challenge assumptions, resulting in better decisions.

Not all city officials have the engineering and web development experience needed to run these tests and code. But this experiment shows that other city employees, without any STEM background, could, with just a bit of training, utilize these generative AI tools to supplement their work.

To make this possible, more authority would need to be granted to frontline workers who too often have their hands tied with red tape. Therefore, we encourage government leaders to allow workers more discretion to solve problems, identify risks, and check data. This is not inconsistent with accountability; rather, supervisors can utilize these same generative AI tools, to identify patterns or outliers—say, where race is inappropriately playing a part in decision-making, or where program effectiveness drops off (and why). These new tools will more quickly provide an indication as to which interventions are making a difference, or precisely where a historic barrier is continuing to harm an already marginalized community.  

Civic groups will be able to hold government accountable in new ways, too. This is where the linguistic power of large language models really shines: Public employees and community leaders alike can request that tools create visual process maps, build checklists based on a description of a project, or monitor progress compliance. Imagine if people who have a deep understanding of a city—its operations, neighborhoods, history, and hopes for the future—can work toward shared goals, equipped with the most powerful tools of the digital age. Gatekeepers of formerly mysterious processes will lose their stranglehold, and expediters versed in state and local ordinances, codes, and standards, will no longer be necessary to maneuver around things like zoning or permitting processes. 

Numerous challenges would remain. Public workforces would still need better data analysis skills in order to verify whether a tool is following the right steps and producing correct information. City and state officials would need technology partners in the private sector to develop and refine the necessary tools, and these relationships raise challenging questions about privacy, security, and algorithmic bias…(More)”

Managing smart city governance – A playbook for local and regional governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by UN Habitat” “This playbook and its recommendations are primarily aimed at municipal governments and their political leaders, local administrators, and public officials who are involved in smart city initiatives. The recommendations, which are delineated in the subsequent sections of this playbook, are intended to help develop more effective, inclusive, and sustainable governance practices for urban digital transformations. The guidance offered on these pages could also be useful for national agencies, private companies, non-governmental organizations, and all stakeholders committed to promoting the sustainable development of urban communities through the implementation of smart city initiatives…(More)”.