Latest news with #cognitivecity
Forbes
06-07-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
Inside The Bold Vision For America's First Cognitive City
An artist's rendering of Pista, a motorsports club, one of 14 districts in the proposed cognitive ... More city of ELISIUM. It may come as a surprise that the United States is only three percent urbanized and it's where 80 percent of Americans live. The country's vast space and rich resources make it ideal for building innovative new cities focused on economic opportunity, quality of life, and sustainability. Yet, except for a few minor developments over the past several decades, no new ambitious cities have broken ground. This may be about to change. A new project called ELISIUM is underway in Florida that could become a model for city development and it's betting big on an urban future of artificial intelligence (AI), data, and automation. Our Future Belongs To Cities After thousands of years of rural existence, today, humans largely live in an urban context. By 2100, the United Nations predicts that 85 percent of the world's population will live in cities. They are the powerhouses of GDP growth and opportunity. Existing urban areas continue to grow and the number of megacities—those that are larger than 10 million inhabitants--is now at 37, a number which is predicted to grow to 67 by 2050. And what about new cities? There's no shortage of ambitious global projects underway such as Masdar City in the UAE and Songdo in South Korea. Notable though is the relative absence of novel greenfield urbanization in the United States. The Concept Of A New American Cognitive City In early 2023, seeking a location to build a motorsports themed country club, a group of successful real estate developers led by Ed Miranda, a veteran of luxury resort construction, identified and secured roughly 4000 acres of land in Hendry County, Florida. It quickly became apparent that significant infrastructure would be required for housing workers, running utilities, and maintaining operations. Design concepts evolved rapidly, and the project began to look like a small city. Inspired by the possibility of creating a development more ambitious than the original intent, the team looked to the Middle East Gulf region and China for ideas. Saudi's NEOM region was particularly influential in their decision-making, and in fact, they recruited NEOM's chief technology officer, Himanshu Kaul, to be part of the founding team. Together, they were convinced, and rightly so, that the US was being left behind by impressive global urban developments, particularly the concept of cognitive cities, a version 2.0 of smart cities, where AI, data, and automation is being used to create more personalized, responsive and adaptable urban experiences. The team decided it was time to build a bold and progressive new sustainable microcity in the US and ELISIUM was born. The Scope Of The Cognitive City ELISIUM is impressive in its vision but modest in its scale. Its total size will eventually reach around 4000 acres when completed and house around 10,800 residents in 4400 homes. Around 20 percent of the development will be dedicated to business use. The development, scheduled to break ground in 2026, will be made up of 14 districts, each with a specific design and theme, including a state-of-the-art private airport, a Formula E quality racing track, and a uniquely designed golf course. An artist's rendering of Aeroville, a 432-acre private airport at ELISIUM. Already, the project has around 50 partners, including top-tier architects, commitments from retailers and technology companies. The estimated cost to build Elisium is $18 billion, which will be raised and spent over a 12-year period, the anticipated duration to complete the entire project. Funding will come from several sources including bonds, private investors, and the team's own funds. Along the way, as with many development projects, phases will open, including the initial sale of memberships and plots in mid-2026. The first residents will be able to move in by 2029. Cognitive Technologies At The Center Much of how the team is approaching ELISIUM is unique. In addition to a hyper-focus on sustainability, technologies such as AI, automation, and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) will play an outsized role in managing and maintaining the community. While thousands of people will be involved in building the microcity, they also intend to utilize robotics in a major way from a construction in the short-term to providing other forms of physical AI in the long-term. With a 12-year project plan, some of their vision for automation will only kick-in after several years as the anticipated technology catches up. Similar to how NEOM created an independent technology arm called Tonomous, ELISIUM has created COGNITIVE. This entity will be the technology provider to ELISIUM, which will use the community as a living lab to innovate and deploy solutions for their own use and then resell these products and services to other cities and developments around the world. Initially, core solutions will include a city operating system (CityOS), a building management system (BuildingAI), and an application called WooHoo for community end users. An AI agent called Verdant, their Chief AI Officer (CAIO), who even has a LinkedIn profile, will be responsible for running and managing complex AI tasks and services across the community. To quote David Grieshaber, ELISIUM's CIO, 'we're building a computer system with a city attached to it.' Why ELISIUM May Succeed Where Others Have Failed The idea of building new, technologically driven cities in the US isn't new, but sadly there's a long list of failed attempts. Reasons that success hasn't been forthcoming range from overly ambitious plans to poor governance, political resistance, and bureaucratic quagmire in dealing with federal, state, and other entities. To avoid these traps, the team behind ELISIUM aren't establishing a city with all the state regulations that come along with it. Instead, it will be designated as a private luxury resort community that will work closely with the county. The project also benefits from its modest scale. At approximately 4000 acres and 10,800 residents, it's significantly smaller, less complex, and more manageable than most new city initiatives. This is also a team that has vast experience having collectively been involved in over 100 projects around the world. They know what works and what doesn't and they're leveraging their experience and lessons learned to avoid many of the pitfalls. Notably, their risk register is over 1000 pages in length. They're aware, for example, of the privacy concerns that have made other smart city efforts receive show-stopping backlash. Finally, consistent with their prioritization of cognitive technologies, they're already using AI extensively for analysis, decision-making, and planning and design. Despite having many advantages, building a new city is extreme in the challenges the team will face and successfully executing their vision will be no cakewalk. The Time Is Right For Bold And Ambitious City Projects In addition to ELISIUM, other urban innovators including Telosa, which is notably more ambitious in scale, and the notional idea of Freedom Cities, indicate some momentum in this space. That said, the opportunity to build new cities in the US remains shockingly untapped. An artist's rendering of Telosa, Marc Lore's vision for a new, innovative and fully sustainable city ... More in the US Right now, the ELISIUM team might just have the vision and experience to deliver America's first cognitive city. While a small group of people will enjoy the luxuries of ELISIUM—and having a home there will come at a premium, one of the most important impacts it may ultimately have is as a sustainable model for all types of new communities in the future. As a trailblazer, ELISIUM could be just what is needed to inspire a new era of smart urbanization right here in the US.
Forbes
08-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Cognitive Cities Are Rising To Define The Urban Future
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.
