Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as an impactful feature of the life, planning and governance of 21st-century cities. Once confined to the realm of science fiction and small-scale ...technological experiments, AI is now all around us, in the shape of urban artificial intelligences including autonomous cars, robots, city brains and urban software agents. The aim of this article is to critically examine the nature of urbanism in the emergent age of AI. More specifically, we shed light on how urban AI is impacting the development of cities, and argue that an urbanism influenced by AI, which we term AI urbanism, differs in theory and practice from smart urbanism. In the future, the rise of a post-smart urbanism driven by AI has the potential to form autonomous cities that transcend, theoretically and empirically, traditional smart cities. The article compares common practices and understandings of smart urbanism with emerging forms of urban living, urban governance and urban planning influenced by AI. It critically discusses the limitations and potential pitfalls of AI urbanism and offers conceptual tools and a vocabulary to understand the urbanity of AI and its impact on present and future cities.
In this paper I argue that cities in the global South constitute a distinctive 'type' of human settlement. I begin by critiquing Brenner and Schmid's concept of planetary urbanization which erases ...difference among cities and locates the essence of urbanity in the global North. I echo their criticism of postcolonial urbanism, however, which has struggled to articulate precisely how Southern cities differ from their Northern counterparts. I then propose three tendencies that, when taken together, serve as the basis of an emergent paradigm of Southern urbanism. First, I assert that cities in the South tend to exhibit a persistent disconnect between capital and labor. Second, I demonstrate that their metabolic configurations are discontinuous, dynamic and contested. Finally, I argue that political economy is not the overriding context within which urban processes unfold, but rather it is always already co-constituted with the materiality of Southern cities. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of characteristics exhibited uniformly by all cities in the global South. Instead, I hope that it serves as a starting point for city-centric scholarship that can account for very real differences between/among cities without constructing cities in the South as pathological and in need of development interventions.
Inspired by postcolonial critiques, urban studies today is characterized by conceptual and methodological experimentation in pursuit of a more global approach to understanding cities. The challenge ...is to develop methods and theoretical practices which allow conceptual innovation to emerge from any urban situation or urbanization process, sustaining wider conversations while insisting that concepts are open to revision. This maps well on to the core methodological problematic of comparison. Mindful of the strong limits to comparison presented by conventional quasi-scientific methods, this paper sets out the basis for a reformatted comparative method. A new grounding for comparison is proposed, specific to the field of the urban, and a new typology of tactics for undertaking urban comparative research is suggested. The paper weaves together classic approaches and more recent innovations in comparison from within urban studies with a wider philosophical analysis of the issues at stake in reframing the architecture of comparison. The paper stands as an invitation to practise global urban studies differently – comparatively – but also to practise comparison differently, in a way that opens urban studies to a more global repertoire of potential insights. The paper develops this invitation and methodological quest through Marxist political-economy; through actually-existing vernacular comparative practices of urban studies; and through insights gleaned from Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical project. The last section of the paper explains how this new vocabulary of comparative method can be put to work through a review of some recent experiments in the field of global urban studies.
ABSTRACT The consolidation of the zone as an industrial area of strategic national importance had as one of its principle spatial consequences the construction of an important number of residential ...complexes developed in response to the installation of diverse industrial enclaves and, consequently, led to the configuration of the territory that is now known as the Metropolitan Area of Concepción. The cities involved in this process became privileged zones for the establishment of workers and employees of the industrial sector. The principle results show that these groupings proposed a new reading of public space in which the main outcome was the disappearance of the traditional street corridor and the appearance of new green spaces as the articulators of the complexes. Se trató de la instalación de unos 50 bloques 1020, 12 de ellos adosados por su lado menor, sobre el cerro el Golf, al oriente de la Laguna Redonda, hito geográfico del sector, y ubicados en dirección norte-sur.
The “smart city” has risen to global prominence over the past two decades as an urban planning and development strategy. As a broad but contested toolkit of technological services and policy ...interventions aimed at improving the efficacy and efficiency of urban systems, the “smart city” is subject to several pressing critiques. This paper acknowledges these concerns, but recognizes the potential of “urban intelligence” to enhance the resiliency of metropolitan areas. As such, we focus on an under-researched dimension of smart city urbanism: its application in peripheral urban areas. The paper introduces a threefold typology of: (a) geographic (spatial); (b) hard (material); and (c) soft (social) urban peripherality. Second, it reviews the concept of urban resilience and considers how its central characteristics can inform the objectives and implementation of “smart city” infrastructures and planning. Six European smart city plans are assessed via a qualitative content analysis, to identify the target of smart city actions; the characteristics of urban resilience mobilized; and the spatial focus of planned interventions. The comparative analysis reveals a variegated set of smart-city approaches. Notably, “smart” actions aimed at enhancing social innovation are the most common type of intervention, while overall there remains a strong tendency for smart urbanism to focus on the urban core. We conclude by calling for a research agenda addressing smartness in, of, and for, peripheral urban spaces and communities.
How might we conceptualise and research everyday urbanism? By examining the making of everyday life in a lowincome neighbourhood in Uganda, we argue that a dialectics of everyday urbanism is a useful ...approach for understanding urban poverty. This dialectical approach examines how marginalised urban dwellers navigate the city in the relative absence of formal infrastructure systems, service provision and state welfare, and in turn exceed those limitations through forging connections, capacities and opportunities. We reveal the 'social infrastructures' that people put together to sustain life, as well as the limits of and placed on these infrastructures, from the legacies of structural adjustment to ongoing forms of demolition and disinvestment. We identify a set of practices that operate alongside social infrastructure - 'coordination', 'consolidation' and 'speculation' - important in the composition of everyday urban life. In doing so, we reflect on how we might research the dialectics of everyday urbanism, and here a 'follow-along participant observation' (FAPO) methodology has significant potential. Our arguments emerge from research with residents in Kampala, but open out questions for how we conceive and research everyday life and urban infrastructure more generally.
This article discusses the ontological underpinnings and normative assumptions of the New Urbanism paradigm by exploring how long-term residents explain differences in two historic neighborhoods in ...Memphis, Tennessee. By using an engaged research approach, it examines the production and transformation of space, questioning the meaning of traditions from the perspective of Black residents. Findings suggest that a paradigm of urbanism ought to be built on a systematic investigation of the people–space–time nexus, arguing that the intersection of urbanisms is a way to understand and act on phenomena of urbanization often overlooked by mainstream urban design approaches.
Based on the critical debates in urban theory, political ecology and urban political ecology literature, this article interrogates the potentialities and limitations of degrowth/post-growth planning, ...regarding relational, non-dualistic and multi-scalar spatialization of nature conservation. It firstly reveals that pragmatic, technoscientific and “sustainable/ecological urbanism” and market-based nature conservation it incorporates exacerbate socio-ecological crises and socio-spatial inequalities in and beyond cities under the conditions of planetary urbanisation. Second, it interrogates how new market-based nature conservation turned into 'green-grabbing' and primitive accumulation. Having explored the degrowth or post-growth approach in relation to other radical nature conservation approaches (e.g., convivial conservation and global safety network), it interrogates the ways in which post-growth planning deals with socio-spatial aspects of nature conservation. It takes the “degrowth/ post-growth planning” both as an instrument to spatialize radical nature conservation and as an approach addressing socio-ecological injustices and inequalities intersecting at multiple scales. It concludes that the degrowth/ post-growth planning can overcome its limitations and advance its potentialities, drawing from already existing radical conservation and critical approaches in neighbouring disciplines as well as the discipline itself.
•Planning has been oriented towards growth.•“New” market based conservation culminate in socio-ecological injustices and inequalities.•Mainstream planning adapts itself to “new” conservation and resorts to technoscientific, ecological and pragmatic urbanism.•Planning must re-align itself with critical urban theory and promote radical conservation and degrowth alternatives.•Relational and repoliticized conservation can be a tool to concretize degrowth alternatives in planning.
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