Equitable urbanism: How AI advances inclusive city planning and resource allocation
Source: Autodesk | By: Zach Mortice | July 16, 2024
Discover how equitable urbanism AI transforms cities, with innovative tools enhancing planning and improving analytics for more inclusive development.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly being leveraged to create more equitable and sustainable urban environments worldwide.
AI-powered tools are being developed to improve equitable urbanism by mapping informal settlements in rapidly urbanizing regions like Latin America.
These tools aid in integrating underserved areas into urban planning and resource allocation, addressing significant infrastructure and service gaps.
AI-driven analyses of urban environments help address spatial inequality, improve biodiversity and livability, and guide policy decisions for more equitable development.
Despite challenges such as data privacy and scalability, ongoing efforts are enhancing the effectiveness and applicability of AI in urban contexts.
Latin America is one of the Earth’s most urbanized—and urbanizing—places, where 81% of people live in cities. In 1950, only 41% of Latin American people lived in cities, and the massive crush of people flooding into urban areas since then has generated vast informal settlements that exist outside of municipal access to basic services and utilities and even administrative recognition.
According to the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), 21% of the inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean, some 110 million people, live in these informal settlements, where they face severe problems with pollution, access to transit and services, security, and subpar infrastructure. It’s a long-simmering problem that leaders are looking toward new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to help solve.
AI-empowered photogrammetry engines can map informal settlements, the first step toward integrating them into administrative censuses and allocating resources appropriately. AI is playing a critical role in more developed North American contexts, as well, using publicly available data to evaluate and improve the quality of urbanism via policy solutions.
While the context and application can be very different, urbanists and data scientists are joining forces to use AI to develop more equitable cities. The hope is that a more granular understanding of how urban processes work, derived from publicly available visual data, can generate better policy solutions and the coalitions needed to win support for them.
But AI is not an unalloyed good in urban development. This technology is still early in its lifecycle and comes with critical issues of data access, lack of expertise, and scalability challenges, as well as potential threats to the general public such as a lack of data privacy, surveillance capabilities, embedded bias, and disruptions to labor markets. Collectively, these issues significantly impede people’s trust in AI. Regardless, AI tools will play a greater and greater role in planning cities worldwide; the question that remains is how.
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