Smart Cities and Artificial Intelligence: Convergent Systems for Planning, Design, and Operations

Smart Cities and Artificial Intelligence

Convergent Systems for Planning, Design, and Operations

Christopher Kirwan

Visiting Professor, Informatics Research Centre, Henley Business School, University of Reading, United Kingdom

Fu Zhiyong

Associate Dean, China-Italy Design Innovation Hub, Tsinghua University, China

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Smart Cities

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Description of each section

Info system (Fig. 0.0)

Chapter 1. Evolution of cities/technologies

1.1. Overview of smart city concept and context

1.2. The evolution and integration of technology, AI, and cities

1.3. City DNA narratives

1.4. The dimensions of the city and potential for convergence

1.5. How convergence theory applies to smart cities

1.6. Conclusion

Chapter 2. City as living organism

2.1. The city as a living organism

2.2. Principles of collective intelligence

2.3. City DNA

2.4. The role of data collection and mapping

2.5. Conclusion

Chapter 3. Strategies, planning, and design

3.1. Criteria for planning and design of smart cities

3.2. New approaches to innovation for planning and designing smart cities

3.3. Convergence methodologies

3.4. Conclusion

Chapter 4. City Operating Systems

4.1. Overview of operating systems

4.2. The language and representation of systems architecture

4.3. Representational hierarchy of cities as operating systems

4.4. What is the correct OS?

4.5. New constructs—convergence-based city OS

4.6. Conclusion

Chapter 5. Connectivity

5.1. Introduction

5.2. Evolution of connectivity

5.3. The electromagnetic spectrum, frequencies, and bandwidth

5.4. The role of machine learning and deep learning in intelligent connectivity

5.5. Connectivity anatomy

5.6. Integrated networks and services

5.7. Conclusion

Chapter 6. Interface

6.1. City-wide interface—the city is an interface

6.2. City interface functions

6.3. City interface design practices

6.4. Collective intelligence interface

6.5. Convergence Urban Interface

6.6. Conclusion

Chapter 7. Smart City Scenarios

7.1. Introduction

7.2. Theory of systems change

7.3. Smart mobility

7.4. Smart environment

7.5. Smart people

7.6. Smart governance

7.7. Smart economy

7.8. Smart living

7.9. Conclusion

Chapter 8. Smart city functions

8.1. Introduction

8.2. Smart city enablers (hardware infrastructure)

8.3. Introduction to AI, AI applications and capabilities (software infrastructure)

8.4. The convergence of AI applications within smart cities

8.5. Smart city functions

8.6. Conclusion

Chapter 9. Smart city business models

9.1. Introduction

9.2. The smart city/Artificial Intelligence market

9.3. Innovation-led economics

9.4. The new economy

9.5. New forms of business exchange

9.6. Bringing it together

9.7. Conclusion

Chapter 10. Conclusions

10.1. From theory to practice

10.2. East-West Collaboration

10.3. The human factor

10.4. Wide-spread automation

10.5. Consequences of embracing convergence

Appendix

Glossary of Terms

Index

Smart Cities

Series Editors

Tan Yigitcanlar

Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Nicos Komninos

URENIO Research, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

Mark Deakin

Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Untangling Smart Cities (9780128154779)

Copyright

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Notices

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to the celebration of international collaboration and friendship between Christopher Grant Kirwan and Dr. Zhiyong Fu initiated as part of an academic exchange that has evolved for over a decade… and to our families, friends, colleagues, and students who have supported us in shaping the vision and material of this book.

A special dedication to the memory of Constance and Ernest Kirwan, whose creative, intellectual, and spiritual direction has been instrumental.

Preface

There is a reason for convergence in the universe. We live in cycles, ebbs and flows that modulate the rhythms of life evolving towards a state of singularity.

Nature is its own architecture with humans dwelling in the house of planet Earth as a living organism, contributing, participating, affecting. As Alan Watts stated in one of his monologues, we are just a bad case of dandruff on the planet. The question is how disruptive is this condition and will we have enough sensibility to reverse this current systemic malady even if benign to planetary evolution. As Norbert Weiner described in The Human Use of Human Beings, Earth has reached its peak in its lifecycle and is now in a state of pre-entropy. The remedy for arresting this process is in the term he uses as resistance. Within our own human lifecycle, resistance means effective measures to slow the inevitable process of decline.

Beyond the biotechnical environmental challenges we are facing, the socio-economic dimension of human sustainability and self-actualization is perhaps an even greater obstacle that may prevent human advancement to a new level of enlightenment. Without a better distribution of wealth and resources to all the inhabitants of the planet, we will not succeed in achieving a higher state and we will continue to accelerate our own demise as a human race.

Cities are the new space, playground over battleground, for the distribution of global resources as the world's population concentrates in cities. Ironically, we have increased the density of populated areas and reduced the spatial footprint, rather than inversely decentralizing people since we now have access to information, markets and resources that can be obtained through digital networks. This signifies a new world order that requires design solutions that solve specific and global problems that cities create.

Convergence evolution explains how different species evolve with similar traits. Technology is perhaps the unifying element that brings all cities to a similar level of enablement and operational control. However, each city has unique characteristics that embody the concept of city DNA, determining the rate and type of technological absorption and administration that must be factored in.

The world is still divided with the current economic and trade systems that polarize individual and collective interests, obstructing collaboration to solve global challenges. The ability for governments, markets, and societies to develop international standards and regulations to manage resources and design solutions will be even more necessary as the planet is now hyperconnected. This leads to the requirement of co-creation and co-design methods to align, integrate and develop universally accepted solutions.

Hence, there is a need for us to develop and manage the system architecture through a global collective intelligence—with East and West convergent understanding of a shared design. This book represents such a collective design process between two hemispheres, cultures, mindsets, political systems and individual understandings. The collaboration over the past 10   years between the authors is an indication of the attempt to obtain shared values, common interests, and motivation to advance ideas and solutions to allow us to more effectively manage the convergence process through transdisciplinary and transcultural efforts.

The next stage in the evolutionary process is the ability for AI to accelerate the development of solutions that will absolutely be necessary to resist planetary entropy and the potential collapse of cultures and societies. We pursue a combination of design thinking and machine learning, linking human and technology in an integrated flow of data and problem-solving processes to achieve the most optimal convergence state. The ideal outcome is a combination of human well-being, balance of natural systems, and the optimization of technology. This is the search for the obtainment of convergence, as the natural evolutionary process that will again bring humans closer to being in harmony with nature. This entails the formation of a collective intelligence network that will help cities to self-regulate as part of Earth's natural ecosystem, the ultimate goal and steady state of convergence.

Along the path of convergence, many new combinations and hybrids will attempt to determine and design sustainable directions including human machine collaboration, new forms of human-machine behavior, and new pattern languages that move away from a human-centered focus to establishing a higher evolutionary stage of human–machine–nature awareness.

We have positioned this book to appeal to a broad audience, ranging from students to practitioners, through a combination of academic research and professional methods in the emerging field of smart cities - still today a somewhat elusive and catchall term. The evolving discourse surrounding smart cities has represented both a marketing hype that has been slow to come to real substance and at the same time a hyper accelerated demand for creative, technical expertise and advancement across multiple industries and professions, all competing to obtain a piece of the projected 1.5 trillion dollar pie.

Starting a new decade today, January 1st, 2020, building on the much anticipated 2020 threshold embodying clear vision and future insight, we are now firmly entrenched in the process of the convergence of technology, humans, and nature in a way never before possible in human evolution. This process is both necessary and part of the evolutionary medium that will allow humans to manage the planetary resources and human impact in a more efficient and harmonious manner.

January 1st, 2020

Christopher Grant Kirwan

Acknowledgments

This book has been formed through a combination of professional and academic experience that has led us to defining a theory and practice of convergence.

In the academic realm, this book expands and consolidates research and projects beginning in 1996 and continuing through the present. This includes numerous courses and special projects spanning Design and Technology, Information Architecture, Interface Design, Urban Media, as well as Maker Space workshops, year-end exhibitions, and graduate thesis projects. The underlying aspects in all of these initiatives have been interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collaboration, and co-design enabling tried and true and emerging processes. This generative approach fosters the most optimal methods to better understand contemporary challenges and design solutions in the crossover and integration of design and technology and the physical and digital dimensions.

On the professional side, this book represents a diversified, multigenerational design practice (based on the authors' work experiences and backgrounds) spanning product design, architecture, urban planning, graphic design, interactive design, and new media—related to the practice of the development of sustainable global projects and with a special focus on smart cities. The enterprises that the authors have established as professional practices and/or have worked with as consultants in the business of Smart Cities and AI include Newwork International, AI Convergence, VITADIGI, Linkay Technologies, IA New, Empire Asia Holding in London and Bangkok, and other enterprises related to the design and development of Smart Cities and Smart Nations.

Many students and faculty collaborators were involved in various parts of the research and application of this book over the past two decades, from Tsinghua University, Parsons School of Design, Henley Business School, Harvard Graduate School of Design, collaboration with Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, KAIST, Seoul National University, and other institutions where the authors have taught and/or have established academic research collaboration and partnerships, such as the Beijing Design Lab, Service Design Lab, and Innohub.

Other individuals whom we would like to recognize for the guidance and advice include Lady Susan Griffiths, Advisor, for her support in reviewing this book throughout all phases, Edward S. Grant and Joseph Bezzone, Advisors, for their strategic feedback, Tad Crawford, Publisher, Writer, for his instrumental technical advice and guidance, Sven Travis, Associate Professor, Parsons School of Design, for our 25 years of media technology collaboration, Sahara Kirwan for assisting in the initial documentation preparation and Sanah Kirwan for ongoing encouragement.

Credits

The specific team brought together to assist the authors in the execution of this book include the following:

Brent Cooper—researcher, editor, and contributor

Meng Lin—graphic design and technical illustrations

Bika Armand—technical research, communication engineering, systems architecture and integration—contributor Chapter 5

Stefan Dobrev—AI research and innovation strategy—contributor Chapter 8

Huan Wang—research coordination and graphic design

Ling Chyi Chan—research coordination

Jiru Zhao—research coordination

Jianhua Gu—graphic design and technical illustrations

Jeong Eun Song—graphic design and technical illustrations

Songling Gao—graphic design and technical illustrations.

Tommaso Guerzoni—researcher

Sahara Kirwan—documentation administration and proofing

Miraal Moazzam—proofing

Tsinghua University Student Projects:

Xingjian Cui—technical illustration City DNA (Fig. 2.5)

Citizen Engagement (Fig. 6.4)

Junjie Yu, Ke Fang, Yin Li, Yechang Hu, Jieyun Yang—project creators Co-Pulse

Junjie Yu—project creator Sub Scope

Xu Lin—project creator City Care

Introduction

Until very recently the worlds of Digital and Brick-and-Mortar have remained divided along the lines of the old and new economies. Old economies were based on resource development, industrial processes and human labor. New economies operate on a higher level of abstraction, leveraging computing power and venture capital, such as with Silicon Valley tech startups and IPOs. This separation has influenced the business landscape of how real estate development, infrastructure and cities have evolved. In the physical world, real estate is limited to property market value. It is valued with respect to available land and prices can be relativized on a per square meter basis. The digital economy has no such spatial constraints and is scalable. As such, prices and profits can be unmoored from a physical base.

Today we are finally seeing these two different worlds converging—the abstract with the concrete—but not without a massive reconceptualization of how we plan, design, and implement smart cities. Defining and building smart cities aimed at the convergence of the virtual and the real will ensure harmonious, sustainable solutions will be developed, allowing for adaptation and change as technology, humans, and the physical environment evolve and are impacted differently. This book provides a comprehensive approach to the planning, design, and operations of smart cities and the significant roles Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays in the convergence of cities, technology, and nature.

At this particular moment in time, perhaps one of the several major paradigm shifts in human progress, we have a moment to pause before plunging headlong into the new reality that is at our threshold: a reality led by new technologies that are already beginning to transform every aspect of our contemporary life as we understand and experience it. This new reality, if managed ethically through private–public–people partnerships, guiding the convergence of technology with natural and social systems to form self-regulating governance platforms, will potentially be the solution to what humanity has constructed as our current demise; the overpopulation of cities, socioeconomic inequality and injustice, exploitation of our natural resources and the destruction of earth's ecosystems. As cities now make up more than 50% of the concentration of the world's population and are absorbing an increasing share of people, cities are presently the most important point of leverage to focus on as it relates to the optimization of the earth resources through the application of technologies to improve efficiencies for a more sustainable planet. Smart cities, therefore, are the key to bringing this all together.

In ancient times, humans were more connected to the natural world with direct relational awareness of universal biorhythms. As we have evolved with the use of technology, we have moved away from this direct connection with nature and have lost the capability of sensing nature instinctually. In the process of the mass migration and overpopulation of urban centers, humans have exacerbated the interrelationship with nature and compromised earth's balance. The concepts put forth in this book, rooted in the theory of convergence, attempt to explain how new technologies enabled by AI, in the present and future stages of human development, can potentially bring us closer to nature, assisting humans to understand and visualize the biorhythms and corresponding patterns of nature and our footprint and impact on the ecosystem. In this new stage of development, AI will enable us to achieve a collective intelligence that has the potential to create a critically needed interface between humans and the natural world. This interface will be formed over the next fifty years through a new hyper-accelerated stage of technology and the convergence of human and machine that will significantly impact our relationship with the planet and the natural world (see Fig. 1).

We now have the opportunity to reverse the anthropogenic damages done to planet earth and its biosphere and to maintain homeostasis, which Norbert Weiner described, in The Human Use of Human Beings, as the need to resist the general stream of corruption and decay. Just as humans are now able to apply preemptive measures to personal health management, AI and related technologies provide us the necessary tools to better manage our natural resources and address anomalies in planetary behaviors in real time. Through the advancements identified as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) representing next generation Information and Communications Technology (ICT) combined with ecosystem-based innovation, we have established the basis of new technological processes that will allow us to achieve a simultaneous balance of human well-being and environmental sustainability.

In this regard, this book presents a positivistic point of view of how technology is playing a role in human evolution and evolution in general. It neither takes a social anthropological or political approach nor a technocratic one. The concepts presented in this book are a combination of scientific, technological, and humanistic theory, driven by design thinking with a rationale that follows the notion that convergence, within the natural evolution of systems, is inevitable. In this case, the evolutionary convergence of human civilization, the natural world, and the technologies made possible with the advancements in ICT, AI, nanotechnology, biotechnology, design, cognitive science, and other related fields.

As part of defining this point of view, the book draws from diverse fields of knowledge and philosophies of the East and the West to achieve a more holistic understanding of evolutionary processes. The schism between eastern and western philosophy, science and medicine, which remains still to this day an impediment to achieving a more enlightened human civilization, may finally have an opportunity to reach a new dimension of interrelations with the advancements in technology. Thus, the worldly perspective presented in this book may provide a new consciousness to support the process of convergence incorporating both linear and nonlinear processes and in defining a greater cross-cultural collective intelligence. Without a global partnership and a coherent set of internationally recognized standards of city design, energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, labor relations, education, and human rights, the potential for chaos and collapse will be even greater and will potentially speed up our decline.

Figure 1 Evolution/convergence of systems.

In a counterintuitive way, the evolution of technology—from the ability to reorder material and social relations on a global scale to creating general AI—also brings about a realization that low-tech solutions will be, in the end, more sustainable in some cases. A return to a natural, holistic approach to managing resources and consuming less may allow humans and nature to achieve a better balance. Nevertheless, it appears that advancements in technology will not slow down anytime soon and embracing technology and steering it toward a more universally equitable application is required in the long run to achieve a unified operating system—OS Planet Earth. As the natural world follows ebbs and tides, so will the evolution of technology, requiring complexity to lead us to simplicity.

In the theory of communication, semantic noise and psychological noise are comprehension barriers between the transmitter and the receiver. The sum of this noise can hold back discourse and drown out the best options. In this way, the complexity of the future advanced technology is speaking to us, but the signal-to-noise ratio makes it hard to hear, so it will require a holistic shift that brings all things into a harmonious state of convergence, where diverse systems become integrated in a unified state of being.

Convergence theory proposition

This book proposes the application of a new composite theory of how cities adopt technology over a period of time based on diverse subtheories of convergence, such as for evolution, society, science, media, nature, technology, knowledge, organizations and globalization. One notion of how these intersect at a higher level is the concept of the smart city as a convergent socio-cyber-physical complex, which is optimally adaptive to itself, the state space, and its members. The 4IR is a major theme in these convergences and the development of the smart city. Additionally, in developing a proposed methodology for how cities can best integrate technology within the planning, design, and operations of cities, the Convergence Theory for initial value problems is co-opted and reinterpreted to develop a concept of Net Present Potential that identifies and analyzes the underlying conditions of the state of the city (current physical, cultural and technological status). Solving initial value problems amounts to predicting the evolution of complex systems, and understanding this process can help show how the Net Present Potential determines the evolutionary process of adaptation and convergence of cities and technology. The following explanation is provided to help understand the foundational theories of our combined interpretation and application of convergence to illuminate the evolutionary process of the merging together of diverse systems including human, natural and technological.

In our Appendix, we explore six topics of convergence that informed our theoretical and practical understanding. The basic concept comes from convergent evolution, the observation of similar traits in different species, such as the eyes, hair, organs, appendages, or wings, which did not evolve from a common ancestor. They evolved the same function because it was so adaptive to a particular environment. Convergence theories of society observe common features and patterns across different cultures and states. Within science and technology, different techniques and tools are being combined to accelerate innovation as well as integration with nature. This trend is converging in Nanotech, Biotech, ICT and Cognitive Science (NBIC). There is also a convergence of knowledge, technology, and society that is bringing together common knowledge through consilience, networking and new forms of socialization. Digital convergence has shown exponential growth in computing power according to Moore's law, as well as prolific social media connectivity and AI assistance. Finally, organization convergence adopts more flexible strategies, holistic ontologies, and best practices to overcome traditional hierarchies, inequalities, path dependencies and pathologies.

Methods that are converging in smart city design include Living Labs, Innovation Hubs, Design Thinking, Co-design and Citizen Centric Cities. Machine learning and Generative Design are converging and accelerating, enhancing workflow and computational power and enabling designers to work more intuitively. By setting certain parameters and letting AI do the heavy lifting humans and technology are converging ever closer through the smart design of their own environments. This idea constitutes our convergence methodology as shown in Table 1.

From this research, we intuited and designed six types of convergences that fall into three categories. There is a convergence of nature, with convergent evolution and scientific process convergence. There is a convergence on the human level, where society converges through growth, interaction and social systems, as well as general knowledge converging into collective intelligence; lastly, technology convergence, where digital, ICT and AI systems converge. These form our basic layers of analysis and align with our six dimensions of convergence described in Chapter 1. There is simultaneous convergence in all dimensions, and they are all converging with each other. However, biological evolution is slow, and technology evolves on an exponential curve that quickly outpaces biology. Metaconvergence is the convergence of all of them, which is not linear, but accelerating and recursive because of the faster evolution of human culture and technology. The six theories and convergence and six dimensions of smart city development effected can be seen in Table 1.

Table 1

Fourth Industrial Revolution

The 4IR is the fourth major leap in technological productivity and represents a potent new stage of globalization. The first was the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century characterized by machines, iron manufacturing, textiles, rail transport, urbanization and unprecedented population growth. The second was dominated by steel, oil, electricity, mass production, the telephone and the internal combustion engine. The third is the digital revolution in our recent history: that of the personal computer, basic Internet and ICT. The 4IR is exemplified through cyber-physical systems, breakthroughs in robotics, AI, nanotech, quantum computing, the Internet of things (IoT), 5G wireless, 3D printing, clean energy, smart cities and autonomous vehicles.

The idea of convergence can be tracked throughout these stages, pointing us toward a technological singularity in the near future. Our mandate in this book is to use the science of convergence to influence a more sustainable process of the planning, design, and operations of our cities and to play a pivotal role in bringing OS Planet Earth online. Understanding how convergence works in the 4IR is critical for getting us through the current various ecological, social and epistemic crises. The bureaucratic bottleneck choking out progress will either be the cause of our extinction or the catalyst of our convergence on metasolutions, thereby releasing the pressure valve to liberate creative and productive forces to collaboratively build self-sustaining and self-regulating smart cities.

The metamodern turn

The 4IR is one of the several distinct historical markers for the metamodern era, circa the turn of the millennium, 2000, as described by Dutch cultural theorists Vermeullen and van den Akker. Other relevant markers include global social movements, global financial crises, and the coining of the anthropocene to mark the new period of humans as the dominant geological force on the planet. Philosopher Hanzi Freinacht develops the concept of metamodernism further into an active social and political philosophy, as well as a theory of (co-)development. Our notion of metamodernism notes these cues but has a deeper root in Albert Borgmann's philosophy of technology and his definition of metamodernism. As metamodern theorist Brent Cooper explains in his review, Borgmann used the term metamodern in an earlier formulation but then switched to postmodern realism in Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992) for practical reasons. Nevertheless, we adhere to the spirit of his metamodern vision, which is needed now more than ever, as metamodernism in the broader