From smart city to artificial intelligence city. Envisaging the future of urban planning
Abstract
The paper emphasizes the need to advance both theoretical and methodological understandings to reflect the theoretical-methodological evolution of urban planning, considering the vast potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Specifically, the paper aims to chart an innovative path for the discipline of urban planning by adopting a systemic approach to studying urban phenomena and envisioning how the intentional integration of AI can lead to a completely new way of managing urban transformation. The study seeks to provide a fresh perspective on AI's potential impact, especially within fields overseeing urban and territorial changes. It begins with an analysis of the relationship between technological innovation and urban transformation, which is crucial today due to the opportunities AI presents. The paper particularly focuses on the relationships among urban sub-systems, which are essential for city survival. Historically, from the inception of urban planning to the rise of smart cities, the integration of technology and urban environments often lacked a cohesive theoretical framework to guide the deliberate adoption of technological innovations. The primary aim of the paper is to highlight the urgent need to build a theoretical and disciplinary foundation that recognizes AI's creative capacity and effectively utilizes its capabilities to design sustainable future urban configurations in harmony with existing resources.
Downloads
References
Balducci, A. (Ed.). (2023). La città invisibile. Quello che non vediamo sta trasformando le metropoli. Feltrinelli, Milano.
Barnes, J. A. (1972). Social Networks. Addison-Wesley, Boston.
Batty, M. (2009). Cities as complex systems: scaling, interaction, networks, dynamics and urban morphologies. In Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science , 1041-1071. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_69
Batty, M. (2013). Big data, smart cities and city planning. Dialogues in Human Geography, 3 (3), 274-279. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/2043820613513390
Batty, M. (2018). Artificial intelligence and smart cities. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 45 (1), 3-6. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808317751169
Bauman, Z. (2011). Modernità liquida. Laterza, Bari.
Beguinot, C. (Ed.). (1989). La città cablata: un'enciclopedia. Università degli studi di Napoli-Dipartimento di pianificazione e scienza del territorio, Napoli.
Bertuglia, C. S., Leonardi, G., Occelli, S., Rabino, G. A., Tadei, R. & Wilson, A. G. (Eds.). (1987). Urban Systems: Contemporary Approaches to Modelling. Routledge, London.
Cameli, S. A. (2020). Natural or artificial? A reflection on a complex ontology. Planning Theory, 20 (3), 191-210. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095220963355
Carpentieri, G., Guida, C. & Sgambati, S. (2023). Textometric analysis on the ongoing academic spatial planning debate. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 16 (1), 197-223. https://doi.org/10.6093/1970-9870/9782
Castells, M. (1989). The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Craven, P. & Wellman, B. (1973). The Network City. Sociological Inquiry, 43 (3-4), 57-88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1973.tb00003.x
Ferré-Bigorra, J., Casals, M. & Gangolells, M. (2022). The adoption of urban digital twins. Cities, 131, 103905. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103905
Fistola, R. (1992). La città come sistema. In Beguinot, C. & Cardarelli, U. (Eds.), Per il XXI secolo una enciclopedia. Città cablata e nuova architettura (Vol. II, Cap. 2, pp. 408-423). Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II" (Di.Pi.S.T.), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (I.Pi.Ge.T.), Napoli.
Fistola, R. (2003). Sistema urbano e sviluppo di ambienti informativi tridimensionali. Atti della terza conferenza nazionale: INPUT 2003 - Costruzione e gestione della conoscenza (Cd-Rom). Alinea, Firenze.
Fistola, R. (2013). Smart City: thinking About Urban Intelligence. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 6 (1), 47-60. https://doi.org/10.6092/1970-9870/1460
Fistola, R. & La Rocca, R. A. (2013). Smart City Planning: a systemic approach. In T. Yiğitcanlar & M. Bulu (Eds.), Establishing Bridges: the 6th Knowledge Cities World Summit, 520-530. Lookus Scientific, Istanbul.
Fistola, R. (2023). Ecosystem Services for the City as a Complex System: A Methodological Proposal. Sustainability, 15 (12), 9318. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15129318
Gargiulo, C. & Papa, R. (2021). Chaos and chaos: the city as a complex phenomenon. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 14 (2), 261-270. https://doi.org/10.6093/1970-9870/8273
Gasparini, A. & Guidicini P. (Eds.) (1990). Innovazione tecnologica e nuovo ordine urbano. Franco Angeli, Milano.
Giovannini, G. (Ed.) (1984). Dalla selce al silicio. Storia della comunicazione e dei mass media. Gutenberg, Salerno.
Graham, S. & Marvin, S., (1996). Telecommunications and the City. Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. Routledge, London. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203430453
Gruetzemacher, R. & Whittlestone, J. (2021). The transformative potential of artificial intelligence. Futures, 135, 102884. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2021.102884
Holling, C.S. (1986). Resilience of Ecosystems: Local Surprise and Global Change. In W.C. Clark & R.E. Munn (Eds.), Sustainable Development and the Biosphere, 292-317. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Kissinger, H., A., Huttenlocher, D. & Schmidt, E. (2023). L’era dell’intelligenza Artificiale. Mondadori, Milano.
Koumetio Tekouabou, S. C., Diop, E. B., Azmi, R. & Chenal, J. (2023). Artificial Intelligence Based Methods for Smart and Sustainable Urban Planning: A Systematic Survey. Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, 30 (2), 1421-1438. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11831-022-09844-2
Lynch, K. (1964). The Image of the City. The MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
McGreevy, M. P. (2017). Complexity as the telos of postmodern planning and design: Designing better cities from the bottom-up. Planning Theory, 17 (3), 355-374. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095217711473
Meier, R. L. (1962). A Communications Theory of Urban Growth. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Merchant, A., Batzner, S., Schoenholz, S. S., Aykol, M., Cheon, G. & Cubuk, E. D. (2023). Scaling deep learning for materials discovery. Nature, 624 (7990), 80-85. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06735-9
Mitchell, W. J., (1995). City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Papa, R., Gargiulo, C., Cristiano, M., Di Francesco, I. & Tulisi, A. (2015). Less Smart More City. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 8 (2), 159-182. https://doi.org/10.6092/1970-9870/3012.
Papa, R., Battarra, R., Fistola, R. & Gargiulo, C. (2021). The city as a complex system in structural crisis. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 14 (3), 455-491. https://doi.org/10.6093/1970-9870/8696
Parisi, G. (2021). In un volo di storni. Le meraviglie dei sistemi complessi. Rizzoli, Milano.
Ratti, C. (2011). Architecture that senses and responds [Video]. TED Conferences. Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/carlo_ratti_architecture_that_senses_and_responds?subtitle=en&lng=it&geo=it.
Rifkin, J. (1980). Entropy: A New World View. Viking Press, New York.
Rjab, A. B. & Mellouli, S. (2019). Artificial Intelligence in Smart Cities: Systematic Literature Network Analysis. ICEGOV '19: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, 259-269. https://doi.org/10.1145/3326365.3326400
Sanchez, T. W., Shumway, H., Gordner, T. & Lim, T. (2022). The prospects of artificial intelligence in urban planning. International Journal of Urban Sciences, 27 (2), 179-194. https://doi.org/10.1080/12265934.2022.2102538
Sanders, L., Pumain, D., Mathian, H., Guérin-Pace, F. & Bura, S. (1997). SIMPOP: a multiagent system for the study of urbanism. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 24(2), 287-305. https://doi.org/10.1068/b240287
Sundstrom, S. M. & Allen, C. R. (2019). The adaptive cycle: More than a metaphor. Ecological Complexity, 39, 100767. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecocom.2019.100767
Sanjo, O. D. (2023). THE FUTURE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN URBAN PLANNING. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372915182_THE_FUTURE_OF_ARTIFICIAL_INTELLIGENCE_IN_URBAN_PLANNING
Schumpeter, J. A. (2001). Capitalismo, socialismo e democrazia. Etas, Milano.
Silver, D., Hubert, T., Schrittwieser, J., Antonoglou, I., Lai, M., Guez, A., Lanctot, M., Sifre, L., Kumaran, D., Graepel, T., Lillicrap, T., Simonyan, K. & Hassabis, D. (2018). A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play. Science, 362(6419), 1140-1144. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar6404
Slaughter, R. A. (2024). Human Agency and the Technoscientific Dilemma: Contesting the Role of Technology in Shaping our Collective Futures. Futures, 161, 103377. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103377
Von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. George Braziller, New York.
Woetzel, J., Remes, J., Boland, B., Lv, K., Sinha, S., Strube, G., Means, J., Law, J., Cadena, A. & von der Tann, V. (2018). Smart cities: Digital solutions for a more livable future. McKinsey Global Institute. Retrieved from: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/smart-cities-digital-solutions-for-a-more-livable-future
Yigitcanlar, T., Butler, L., Windle, E., Desouza, K. C., Mehmood, R. & Corchado, J.M. (2020). Can Building “Artificially Intelligent Cities” Safeguard Humanity from Natural Disasters, Pandemics, and Other Catastrophes? An Urban Scholar’s Perspective. Sensors, 20 (10), 2988. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20102988
Zhao, T. Z., Kumar, V., Levine, S. & Finn, C. (2023). Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware. arXiv.org. Retrieved from: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13705
Copyright (c) 2024 TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish in this journal agree to the following:
1. Authors retain the rights to their work and give in to the journal the right of first publication of the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution that allows others to share the work indicating the authorship and the initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors can adhere to other agreements of non-exclusive license for the distribution of the published version of the work (ex. To deposit it in an institutional repository or to publish it in a monography), provided to indicate that the document was first published in this journal.
3. Authors can distribute their work online (ex. In institutional repositories or in their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges and it can increase the quotations of the published work (See The Effect of Open Access)