AI and Destructive Creation: Toward a New AI Urban Regime?

Despite the diffuse, diverse, and controversial meaning of the “smart city” concept, its proponents assume that a smart city is capable of better addressing the challenges of urban resilience and sustainability. The evolution of “smart cities” toward a widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, processes, and devices indicates that a new urban AI regime will expand in the coming years, and therefore it is necessary to analyze both the benefits and the risks of this strategy. This disruptive urban AI regime (which I describe as “destructive creation”) generates a critical mass of negative externalities in the development process of smart cities, derived initially from the contemporary hegemonic nature of technological innovation in urban socioeconomic processes. Such a disruptive thrust represents a risk for the centrality of public spaces and the civic friction between humans that should occur, according to Jane Jacobs, in the core of the urban as self-organized complexity. The intelligent disruption (destructive creation) produced by AI systems is no longer avoidable, although we can debate about what kind of sustainability we want for ourselves and for future generations. There should be analyses and discussions around the notion of “smart and just sustainability” as a normative horizon setting the framework to decide what technological innovations and what AI applications we need.