Can Ai Save The Smart City Dream?

Smart-city marketers envisage a future where residents never have to visit a physical city office to conduct business, and resources are automatically allocated based on demand.

Over the past decade, many cities worldwide have adopted varying degrees of the smart-city approach. In Cape Town, for example, residents can handle many issues through smartphones or online.

The model of a truly innovative smart city is changing. Saudi Arabia's planned city Neom on the Red Sea coast promises to weave technology into virtually every aspect of the urban environment. On the other side of the world, a group of leading technology investors in California want to build their own city from scratch and test the smart-city concept to solve urban problems.

California Forever is a project backed by Silicon Valley billionaires Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs and Marc Andreessen, with plans to build a“dream city” in northern California. The project has already acquired vast tracts of land and promises to create a future smart city with the latest in solar power, security, and quality of life.

These investors are responding to the severe decline of Californian cities. From San Francito San Diego, Californian cities have been unable to curb rising crime and homelessness.

The tech backers of California Forever are betting on the smart-city concept of a controlled environment maintained by the latest surveillance technology to provide an alternative to California's increasingly dangerurban areas.

This makes sense. At their core, smart cities are typified by monitoring architecture built into the urban environment. But the public narrative has always been something softer. To appreciate this dichotomy fully, we must consider how emerging markets have transformed over the last two decades.

In the middle of the 2000s, investors began looking for
new markets
with great returns. Thanks to globalization, cheap money due to low-interest rates, and a rising young population, emerging-market countries, mainly in the Global South, became investor hotspots.

A new narrative developed that justified and accelerated new investor sentiment. Namely, technology and growing youth populations were pointing toward a historic transformation of the global economy. The future was in emerging markets.

Technically, this wasn't wrong. Technology has enabled knowledge workers worldwide to have more access to markets. Many cities across the emerging world have growing youth populations that enjoy many more opportunities than their parents. Cities like Dubai have become new nepoints of innovation, bringing diverse populations of people together.

The narrative has broken down in recent years as high interest rates have dried up the cheap money fueling this exuberance. Yet some emerging-market countries have truly come into their own.

The smart-city narrative remains vital to the emerging-market narrative. Using a smartphone to pay a parking ticket is branded by many city officials as a demonstration of technology's promise to make life easier. It removes a hurdle of bureaucracy so often associated with the legacy of colonialism in some emerging market countries.

Now that these developments have become commonplace worldwide, the narrative needs to shift. The rise of artificial intelligence is one area that will change how we think about cities.

Thanks to the large amounts of data cities have collected over the past decade, AI systems can be deployed to predict and handle resource allocation. The seamless experience the smart-city vision promises can be more easily carried out with AI.

The dream of a truly smart city isn't over. As long as humans live in cities, there will be a drive to improve the urban environment.

The branding of smart cities in relation to the growth of emerging markets has likely seen its best days and will change as new technology gives planners more options. As such, an important chapter in the history of urbanism is about to close as another one opens.

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