Reimagining Businesses with AI

CHAPTER 9Transforming Smart Cities with AI

“Adding lanes to solve traffic problems is like loosening your belt to solve obesity.”

—Glen Hemistra

INTRODUCTION

Urbanization finds its roots more than 5,000 years ago during the Mesopotamian civilization. The industrial revolution increased the pace of urbanization as more economic opportunities formed more rapidly around the cities. However, in the past century, urbanization has been accelerating at an unprecedented rate. We touched upon this briefly in our last chapter. This has also been a reason for the tremendous amount of innovation and economic growth as cities concentrate the talented and motivated into an ecosystem to foster creativity and progress. More than 5 billion people are expected to live in urban centers in the next 10 years. However, the way our cities have grown in the past several decades has followed the same path as futurist Glen Hemistra talks about in the above quote, to keep adding infrastructure and resources to meet the growing needs. City planners and society leaders have realized this fallacy and view smart cities as the panacea to solve the resource crunch issue while allowing for urban expansion to continue. Cities have evolved from human zoos to concrete jungles and now are shaping up to be technology museums.

Traditionally, our cities are built around notions of different infrastructure sectors that usually exist in different silos – roads and buildings, mobility and transportation, connectivity, ...