The metaphor of cities as organisms has a long history in urban planning, and a few urban modeling approaches have explicitly been linked to Artificial Life. We propose in that paper to explore the extent of Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence application to urban issues, by constructing and exploring a citation network of around 225,000 papers. It shows that most of the literature is indeed application of methodologies and a rather strong modularity of approaches. We finally develop ALife concepts which have a strong potential for the development of new urban theories.
The current science of cities can provide a useful foundation for future urban policies, provided that these proposals have been validated by correct observations of the diversity of situations in the world. However, international comparisons of the evolution of cities often produce uncertain results because national territorial frameworks are not always in strict correspondence with the dynamics of urban systems. We propose to provide various compositions of systems of cities to better take into account the dynamic networking of cities that go beyond regional and national territorial boundari…
Cities are physical manifestations of our competitive and cooperative behaviours. The tension between these two forces generates dynamic equilibriums whose material expressions are cities and their evolutions. In a Darwinian cooperative view, as Darwinism does not involve only competition, the public benefit obtained by cooperation, return in terms of private benefit too. An urban genetic code is proposed, according to which cities emerge connecting nature and urbanity, and as sum of multiuse, independent micro-areas, each one with its centrality, job locations, parks and daily shops-services …
Cities are becoming smarter and more resilient by integrating urban infrastructure with information technology. However, concerns grow that smart cities might reverse progress on civil liberties when sensing, profiling, and predicting citizen activities; undermining citizen autonomy in connectivity, mobility, and energy consumption; and deprivatizing digital infrastructure. In response, cities need to deploy technical breakthroughs, such as privacy-enhancing technologies, cohort modelling, and fair and explainable machine learning. However, as throwing technologies at cities cannot always addr…
Cybernetic Cities: Designing and controlling adaptive and robust urban systems
Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学应用数学和系统研究所）；Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学复杂性科学中心）；SENSEable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA（美国麻省理工学院感知城市实验室）；MoBS Lab, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, USA（美国东北大学网络科学研究所移动生物系统实验室）；ITMO University, Russian Federation（俄罗斯联邦ITMO大学）；Lakeside Labs GmbH, Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria（奥地利克拉根福沃尔特湖湖畔实验室有限公司）；Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, CNR, Italy（意大利国家研究委员会信息学与电信学研究所）
Urban morphology and socioeconomic aspects of cities have been explored by analysing urban street network. To analyse the network, several variations of the centrality indices are often used. However, its nature has not yet been widely studied, thus leading to an absence of robust visualisation method of urban road network characteristics. To fill this gap, we propose to use a set of local betweenness centrality and a new simple and robust visualisation method. By analysing 30 European cities, we found that our method illustrates common structures of the cities: road segments important for lon…
Computer models and information systems have been used for urban planning and design since the 1950s. Their capacity for analysis and problem-solving has increased substantially since then with hardware and software being able to manage large amounts of data. The beginning of the 2000s brought better technologies for data visualisation and intuitive software products and nowadays they are being used to design and manipulate highly complex urban systems. However, ontological and epistemological questions remain about the nature of urban environments. What do we know about cities - and what is a…
How to assess the potential of liking a city or a neighborhood before ever having been there. The concept of urban quality has until now pertained to global city ranking, where cities are evaluated under a grid of given parameters, or either to empirical and sociological approaches, often constrained by the amount of available information. Using state of the art machine learning techniques and thousands of geotagged satellite and perspective images from diverse urban cultures, this research characterizes personal preference in urban spaces and predicts a spectrum of unknown likeable places for…
Understanding of interaction between people and urban spaces is crucial for inclusive decision making process. Smartphones and social media can be a rich source of behavioral and declarative data about urban space, but it threatens to exclude voice of older adults. The platform proposed in the paper attempts to address this issue. A universal tagging mechanism based on the Pluchik Wheel of Emotion is proposed. Usability of the platform was tested and prospect studies are proposed.
In smart cities built on information and communication technology, citizens and various IT systems interoperate in harmony. Cloud computing and Internet-of-Things technologies that have been developed for a long time are making modern cities smarter. Smart cities can have a positive impact on citizens, but they can also make cities dangerous. Today, with the emerging reality of smart cities, this paper looks at both the bright and dark sides and provides a foundation for supporting work-related tasks of IT professionals as well as non-IT experts involved in urban design and development.
Disparity in spatial accessibility is strongly associated with growing inequalities among urban communities. Since improving levels of accessibility for certain communities can provide them with upward social mobility and address social exclusion and inequalities in cities, it is important to understand the nature and distribution of spatial accessibility among urban communities. To support decision-makers in achieving inclusion and fairness in policy interventions in cities, we present an open-source and data-driven framework to understand the spatial nature of accessibility to infrastructure…
Study of urban form is an important area of research in urban planning/design that contributes to our understanding of how cities function and evolve. However, classical approaches are based on very limited observations and inconsistent methods. As an alternative, availability of massive urban data collections such as Open Street Map from the one hand and the recent advancements in machine learning methods such as deep learning techniques on the other have opened up new possibilities to automatically investigate urban forms at the global scale. In this work for the first time, by collecting a …
Cycling is a promising solution to unsustainable urban transport systems. However, prevailing bicycle network development follows a slow and piecewise process, without taking into account the structural complexity of transportation networks. Here we explore systematically the topological limitations of urban bicycle network development. For 62 cities we study different variations of growing a synthetic bicycle network between an arbitrary set of points routed on the urban street network. We find initially decreasing returns on investment until a critical threshold, posing fundamental consequen…
In the last decades, the notion that cities are in a state of equilibrium with a centralised organisation has given place to the viewpoint of cities in disequilibrium and organised from bottom to up. In this perspective, cities are evolving systems that exhibit emergent phenomena built from local decisions. While urban evolution promotes the emergence of positive social phenomena such as the formation of innovation hubs and the increase in cultural diversity, it also yields negative phenomena such as increases in criminal activity. Yet, we are still far from understanding the driving mechanism…
Urban Visual Intelligence: Studying Cities with AI and Street-level Imagery
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Nanjing Normal University（南京师范大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
In this study, we propose using a neural embedding model-graph neural network (GNN)- that leverages the heterogeneous features of urban areas and their interactions captured by human mobility network to obtain vector representations of these areas. Using large-scale high-resolution mobility data sets from millions of aggregated and anonymized mobile phone users in 16 metropolitan counties in the United States, we demonstrate that our embeddings encode complex relationships among features related to urban components (such as distribution of facilities) and population attributes and activities. …
Against the backdrop of rising anxiety and discussions on the impact of AI on society, I explore in this article the structural possibilities of AI and automation triggering a new social conflict between the current capitalist elites and the emerging "creative class" (R&D scientists, engineers, business developers, etc.), and how this conflict can produce social tensions and transform urban space. By drawing insights from a structurally similar conflict in 17-18th century Europe between the aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie, the impact of this conflict on the social, spatial, and power …
Sustainable roofs, such as those with greenery and photovoltaic panels, contribute to the roadmap for reducing the carbon footprint of cities. However, research on sustainable urban roofscapes is rather focused on their potential and it is hindered by the scarcity of data, limiting our understanding of their current content, spatial distribution, and temporal evolution. To tackle this issue, we introduce Roofpedia, a set of three contributions: (i) automatic mapping of relevant urban roof typology from satellite imagery; (ii) an open roof registry mapping the spatial distribution and area of s…
The technology of Shared Automated Vehicles (SAVs) has advanced significantly in recent years. However, existing SAV studies primarily focus on the system design while limited studies have examined the impacts of exogenous variables, especially urban form, on SAV performance. Therefore, it remains unclear what key urban form measurements may influence SAV system's sustainability. This study fills the research gap by conducting simulation experiments using data collected from 286 cities. This study identifies critical urban form measurements correlated with the simulated SAV performance using f…
Cities are inherently dynamic. Interesting patterns of behavior typically manifest at several key areas of a city over multiple temporal resolutions. Studying these patterns can greatly help a variety of experts ranging from city planners and architects to human behavioral experts. Recent technological innovations have enabled the collection of enormous amounts of data that can help in these studies. However, techniques using these data sets typically focus on understanding the data in the context of the city, thus failing to capture the dynamic aspects of the city. The goal of this work is to…
Cities around the world are expanding dramatically, with urban population growth reaching nearly 2.5 billion people in urban areas and road traffic growth exceeding 1.2 billion cars by 2050. The economic contribution of the transport sector represents 5% of the GDP in Europe and costs an average of US $482.05 billion in the United States. These figures indicate the rapid rise of industrial cities and the urgent need to move from traditional cities to smart cities. This article provides a survey of different approaches and technologies such as intelligent transportation systems (ITS) that lever…
