CFP - 8th Nordic Geographers Meeting, Trondheim 16-19 June 2019.

Inside the artificial brain of the city: an exploration of the impact of AI on urban development

Recently, innovation in artificial intelligence, in the shape of, for instance, machine learning, automation, digitalisation and algorithms, has been having profound spatial implications. So far, AI-driven urban changes have manifested as self-driving cars, autonomous traffic-management platforms, public-safety systems with facial recognition software, ubiquitous environmental sensing, and more.

Overall, these revolutionary technologies are pushing the city to morph into an autonomous urban creature that can act upon its own with unknown outcomes. Projects like Alibaba’s City Brain in China and Kuala Lumpur, for example, are attempting to create artificial urban brains meant to control key aspects of urban living, such as mobility and safety. In so doing, artificial-intelligence urban technologies are gradually taking the management of urban services out of the hands of humans. This session builds upon the main theme of the conference (Geographies of Sustainability), to examine how these new AI-led urban transformations, are impacting on the economic, environmental and social functions of cities.

Conveners:

Federico Cugurullo (Trinity College Dublin) and Andrew Karvonen (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

Potential contributors are invited to send abstracts to [log in to unmask] by December 15