Beyond the smart city: a typology of platform urbanism

Caprotti, Federico; Chang, I.-Chun Catherine; Joss, Simon

doi:10.1186/s42854-022-00033-9

Cited by 47 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…Ref. [15] defines platform urbanism as a "novel set of digitally enabled socio-technological assemblages rooted in the urban, which enables the emergence of new social and material relationships including intermediations and transactions". Platformization refers to "the penetration of infrastructures, economic processes, and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganization of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms" [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures

et al. 2022

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Data infrastructures, economic processes, and governance models of digital platforms are increasingly pervading urban sectors and spheres of urban life. This phenomenon is known as platformization, which has in turn given rise to the phenomena of platform society, where platforms have permeated the core of urban societies. A recent manifestation of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform project launched by Meta (formerly Facebook) as a globally operating platform company. The Metaverse represents an idea of a hypothetical “parallel virtual world” that incarnate ways of living and working in virtual cities as an alternative to smart cities of the future. Indeed, with emerging innovative technologies—such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, the IoT, and Digital Twins—providing rich datasets and advanced computational understandings of human behavior, the Metaverse has the potential to redefine city designing activities and service provisioning towards increasing urban efficiencies, accountabilities, and quality performance. However, there still remain ethical, human, social, and cultural concerns as to the Metaverse’s influence upon the quality of human social interactions and its prospective scope in reconstructing the quality of urban life. This paper undertakes an upper-level literature review of the area of the Metaverse from a broader perspective. Further, it maps the emerging products and services of the Metaverse, and explores their potential contributions to smart cities with respect to their virtual incarnation, with a particular focus on the environmental, economic, and social goals of sustainability. This study may help urban policy makers to better understand the opportunities and implications of the Metaverse upon tech-mediated practices and applied urban agendas, as well as assess the positives and negatives of this techno-urban vision. This paper also offers thoughts regarding the argument that the Metaverse has disruptive and substantive effects on forms of reconstructing reality in an increasingly platformized urban society. This will hopefully stimulate prospective research and further critical perspectives on the topic.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures

et al. 2022

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“…The concept of AIoT builds on that of IoT to describe emerging technologies capable of acting as well as sensing. Sensors, big data and digital networks continue to be fundamental components, since urban AIs, such as autonomous cars, robots and city brains, need sensors (cameras, for instance) to perceive the surrounding environment and they produce big data that is digitally shared and then mediated by digital platforms (Caprotti et al, 2022). What is different is that AIoT brings artificial intelligence and its key capabilities into ordinary things and spaces (Zhang and Tao, 2020).…”

Section: Ai Urbanism Versus Smart Urbanismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The rise of AI urbanism in post-smart cities: A critical commentary on urban artificial intelligence

Cugurullo,

Caprotti,

Cook

et al. 2023

Urban Studies

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as an impactful feature of the life, planning and governance of 21st-century cities. Once confined to the realm of science fiction and small-scale technological experiments, AI is now all around us, in the shape of urban artificial intelligences including autonomous cars, robots, city brains and urban software agents. The aim of this article is to critically examine the nature of urbanism in the emergent age of AI. More specifically, we shed light on how urban AI is impacting the development of cities, and argue that an urbanism influenced by AI, which we term AI urbanism, differs in theory and practice from smart urbanism. In the future, the rise of a post-smart urbanism driven by AI has the potential to form autonomous cities that transcend, theoretically and empirically, traditional smart cities. The article compares common practices and understandings of smart urbanism with emerging forms of urban living, urban governance and urban planning influenced by AI. It critically discusses the limitations and potential pitfalls of AI urbanism and offers conceptual tools and a vocabulary to understand the urbanity of AI and its impact on present and future cities.

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“…However, it "extends the meaning of platformization by going beyond a perspective that views platforms as new actors, appearing on the urban scene and inter-acting with preconstituted spaces and practices" [63]. Indeed, it entails "a growing number of digitally enabled, socio-technical assemblages that engender new kinds of social, economic and political intermediations" [5] (p. 4). Central to these complex and extensive "intermediations" is the digital mediation of cities [13], enabled by data-driven AI and AIoT systems.…”

Section: Platform Urbanismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This global phenomenon has recently risen to prominence and given rise to platform urbanism, a few years prior to the launch of the Metaverse in 2021. Platform urbanism refers to "urban development and urban life facilitated by a growing number of digitally enabled, socio-technical assemblages that engender new kinds of social, economic and political intermediations" [5] (p. 4). This paradigm reflects the ways in which the socio-technical imaginaries of smart cities will evolve, and their alternatives may be shaped by fictional representations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paradigm reflects the ways in which the socio-technical imaginaries of smart cities will evolve, and their alternatives may be shaped by fictional representations. It is an evolution of smart urbanism [6], i.e., "the distinctive features of the experience of everyday life in cities" [7] whose smart processes and practices are being highly responsive to a form of AI and AIoT driven urbanism [8,9] and platform urbanism [5] alike. Smart urbanism is concerned with the infrastructural, functional, service-oriented, and governmental components that can be digitally retrofitted, upgraded, and even "twinned" [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Metaverse as a Virtual Model of Platform Urbanism: Its Converging AIoT, XReality, Neurotech, and Nanobiotech and Their Applications, Challenges, and Risks

Bibri

2023

Smart Cities

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With their exponentially rising computational power, digital platforms are heralding a new era of hybrid intelligence. There has recently been much enthusiasm and hype that the Metaverse has the potential to unlock hybrid intelligence. This is premised on the idea that the Metaverse represents an applied convergence of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) and Extended Reality (XR) that intersects with urbanism in terms of the distinctive features of platform-mediated everyday life experiences in cities. However, social interaction and its resulting social organization in the Metaverse are mediated and governed by algorithms and thus submitted to—a dream of—complete logical ordering. This raises a plethora of concerns related to the systemic collection and algorithmic processing of users’ personal, brain, and biometric data, i.e., profound societal—and the hardest to predict ethical—implications. Therefore, this study analyzes and synthesizes a large body of scientific literature on the unfolding convergence of AIoT and XR technologies, neurotechnology, and nanobiotechnology in the realm of the Metaverse in order to derive a novel conceptual framework for the Metaverse as an envisioned virtual model of platform urbanism. Further, it examines the key challenges and risks of these converging technologies in relation to the Metaverse and beyond. This study employs thematic analysis and synthesis to cope with multidisciplinary literature. The analysis identifies seven themes: (1) Platformization, (2) platform urbanism, (3) virtual urbanism, (4) XR technologies, (5) AIoT technologies, (6) neurotechnology, and (7) nanobiotechnology. The synthesized evidence reveals that, while neurotechnology and nanobiotechnology have numerous benefits and promising prospects, they raise contentions and controversies stemming from their potential use to inflict harm to human users—if left unchecked—through the black box of the algorithmic mediation underpinning the Metaverse. The findings serve to steer the Metaverse to contribute to human flourishing and wellbeing by adhering to and upholding ethical principles as well as leveraging its underlying disruptive technologies in meaningful ways. They also aid scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in assessing the pros and cons of these technologies, especially their inevitable ramifications.

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Beyond the smart city: a typology of platform urbanism

Cited by 47 publications

References 78 publications

The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures

The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures

The rise of AI urbanism in post-smart cities: A critical commentary on urban artificial intelligence

The Metaverse as a Virtual Model of Platform Urbanism: Its Converging AIoT, XReality, Neurotech, and Nanobiotech and Their Applications, Challenges, and Risks

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