Cognitive Cities Are Rising To Define The Urban Future

Forbes

5 hours ago

Cities, where almost 60 percent of all humans now live, often struggle with a long list of issues that include traffic congestion, inefficient public services, high carbon emissions, economic and public safety challenges, and aging water and energy systems. As a result, there's a large and growing demand for novel solutions. It won't come as a surprise that new technologies are playing an increasingly important role in addressing a wide range of urban needs.
The term smart city, which first began to appear in the 1990s, is often used to describe an urban area that adopts innovative digital technologies, data, sensors, and connectivity to improve a community's livability, workability, and sustainability.
The smart city movement has had plenty of successes (and their fair share of failures and backlash), and public agencies committed to the use of innovative technologies and data to drive better governance can be found in every part of the world.
Now a new concept is emerging that builds upon the success and limitations of smart cities. It's called the cognitive city and it's when AI, used in conjunction with other related emerging technologies, creates a more intelligent, responsive, and adaptable urban experience.
This shift is unsurprising. It's happening as the intelligence age drives the emergence of a cognitive industrial revolution, an economic transformation that is forcing every organization to make sense of and see the opportunities in a world of thinking machines.
At their core, cognitive cities are AI-powered and data-driven. They use these technologies and others to understand patterns in the urban space to help with decision-making, planning, and governance, and to power innovative urban solutions.
Instead of being reactive, the aim is for city services to be proactive by anticipating needs and challenges. Over time, the city learns about its community, helping it to evolve to meet current and future needs.
This may all sound a little too abstract, so let's put it in perspective by exploring two cognitive cities being constructed right now.
Perhaps the most famous cognitive city underway is in the northwestern region of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Called NEOM, this area includes The Line. Instead of being built in a traditional radial shape, The Line is a long, narrow strip, proposed to be 106 miles in length, 656 feet in width, and 1640 feet in height.
Advanced cognitive technologies are at the heart of this city, enabling the optimization of transportation, resource management, and energy consumption—it will all be non-carbon based. The city is being designed to understand residents' needs and support personalized and proactive services such as healthcare, activity scheduling, and temperature management.
The city of Aion Sentia, underway in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, has even bolder aspirations. It's being designed to anticipate even more resident needs. If you like to buy a latte from your favorite coffee store each day at 8am, it's going to be ready for you. If you have an anniversary upcoming, you'll be reminded, and reservations will automatically be made at your favorite restaurant.
Central to this cognitive city will be a city-provided app that will be your urban assistant. For example, if you get an energy bill that is higher than expected, you'll be able to tell the app, and it will figure out what you need to do to reduce your energy use. Feeling ill, the app will make a medical appointment and take care of all the related logistics.
Other cities embracing the cognitive city concept include Woven in Japan, Songdo in South Korea, and Telosa in the United States.
This may all sound rather futuristic, and it is. Much of it has yet to be built and proven. The concept of cognitive cities has some significant challenges related to privacy and the extent to which residents even want automation is every aspect of their lives.
Toronto's proposed urban project, Sidewalk, haunts both the city and the developers, and is a litmus test for cognitive technology use, as issues surrounding privacy and data contributed greatly to its abandonment.
In the marketplace of ideas, communities will need to balance the benefits of an AI-powered urban future versus the concerns and risks they present.
These questions and others won't be second order issues but will need to be addressed as priorities as we enter the era of cognitive cities.