Urban scAInce: why and how cities transform through artificial intelligence and their associated technologies

Innovations have largely been the driver of human development; with the current Anthropocene peaking humanity’s influence on the livability of our planet.

Technology is believed to be, once again, the solution to severe environmental, economic, and social crises, even though its implementation has a mixed track-record of finding solutions just to create new and sometimes more severe problems [8]. We ask whether more sustainable cities are smarter?

Therefore, we will develop the urban scAInce theory transforming our understanding of how artificial intelligence and its associated technologies has, can, and will alter urban systems questioning whether the technology transformation leads to more sustainable living in our cities.

We will achieve this goal by: (1) historically correlating urban sustainability outcomes with smart city technology adoption (2) evaluating privately-driven AI solutions on their impact to create more sustainable cities through a pre/post study (3) evaluating whether future cities will be sustainable by inaugurating a virtual open science city that allows its residents living across the world to jointly change their virtual environment, and (4) estimating the sustainability gap of 41000 cities through analyzed archetype cities.