Artificial intelligence (AI) is now mediating, and in some cases seen to be controlling, key urban services and infrastructures, thus becoming a prominent feature of the contemporary city. As portrayed in recent studies, the “autonomous city” can be understood as a city where
urban artificial intelligences perform tasks and take on roles which have traditionally been the domain of humans. At stake in these debates are questions related to the meaning and ongoing role of intelligence, for both humans and machines. While autonomous cars transport people, service robots run shops, drones deliver goods and city brains govern entire cities, humans are redefining the meaning of what “smart” means in the city and what role the human being may play in future urban spaces. With humans shifted to new sectors of the economy or pushed aside by algorithms and robotic agents creating new ways of seeing and governing the city, we raise the question as to whether or not cities are becoming more autonomous from human experience in the sense that their operation does not rely as much on human inputs anymore.
With the advent of AI, novel and unknown human-machine relationships are being forged in the management of urban spaces. The emergence of the “autonomous city” and the role of AI in it generate unprecedented and urgent questions of urban governance as well as urban life itself. This Research Topic focuses on the governance of the autonomous city, specifically from two interrelated perspectives. First, we seek to develop an empirical and theoretical understanding of the governance of urban artificial intelligences, as well as how the socio-political and economic structures of urban (human) life are being changed by AI. On these terms, the aim of this Research Topic is to explore the political processes, stakeholder networks, logics and policies through which autonomous cars, urban robots and city brains, for example, are integrated into cities, thereby replacing or complementing existing urban technologies and infrastructures. Second, we aim to understand how AI is employed in urban governance, by examining how urban artificial intelligences take on responsibility for urban domains ranging from transport to health and from planning to security and then govern them.
We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions addressing (but not limited to) the following topics:
• The urban governance of autonomous cars, robots and city brains
• Emerging models and dynamics of AI-mediated urban governance
• The issue of responsibility in spaces managed by AI and the development of responsible AIs
• Networks of human and artificial intelligences in the governance of the autonomous city
• Interactions and tensions between human and artificial intelligences in urban governance
• The ethical principles employed by urban artificial intelligences and their developers in the governance of cities
• AI-mediated or managed urban governance in ethically complex scenarios in which distributing harm is unavoidable
• Social, environmental, political, and economic implications of cities governed by AI
• Citizens’ responses to acts of governing undertaken by AI
• Cartography of the urban spaces and infrastructures governed by AI
• The extent to which the use of AI in urban governance can improve or damage the sustainability of cities
• Comparisons between political decisions made by AI and human-made decisions
• Debates about the future of human-nonhuman relations in the emerging autonomous city, which embrace, challenge, or attempt to reconcile techno-pessimism and techno-optimism
• Posthumanism, the “cyborg”, and other posthumanist theories of hybridity that challenge the notion of “autonomy” for humans or machines as separate urban entities
• The meaning of “intelligence” in the autonomous city
