These smart cities are shaping the way people will live, travel and interact in the future
For the modern traveller, visiting a city isn’t simply about exploring its history. It can also be about glimpsing the future. The concept of a “smart city” emerged in the late 20th century as urban centres sought to integrate technology to enhance efficiency, sustainability and quality of life. Today, these cities use artificial intelligence, big data and automation to drive economic growth, maximise resources and create seamless experiences for residents and tourists alike. From AI-driven transit to eco-conscious architecture, these smart cities prove that innovation and tourism are a perfect match. If you want to experience what tomorrow looks like today, these smart cities are the destinations to put on your radar.
Weiterlesen: 10 futuristic smart cities that marry innovation with tourism
Picture a city where AI anticipates your needs before you even voice them. Traffic moves effortlessly as predictive analytics reroute congestion before it happens. Energy consumption is fine-tuned through self-optimizing intelligent grids, reducing waste while ensuring seamless power distribution. Public services, from healthcare to transportation, adapt in real time using machine learning, creating a city that is not just efficient but truly responsive to its residents.
This is not the backdrop of a sci-fi film. It is the emerging reality of urban living. As AI-driven infrastructure takes hold, cities are evolving into dynamic, self-regulating ecosystems where technology works in harmony with human activity. The future will be sustainable, immersive, and tailored to individual and collective needs, a transformation that goes beyond the traditional concept of a smart city.
Weiterlesen: Beyond Today’s Smart Cities: Building A Multimodal Metropolis
Urban planning is no longer dependent solely on satellite imagery and traditional surveys. HSI provides high-resolution, real-time spectral data, allowing urban planners to assess land use, monitor infrastructure conditions, and detect environmental changes. One key application is in identifying vegetation health, helping cities maintain green spaces and manage urban forests more effectively.
Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) - a cutting-edge technology revolutionizing smart cities - is revolutionizing urban planning and development. Unlike traditional imaging, HSI captures spectral data across hundreds of wavelengths, providing unparalleled detail for environmental monitoring, resource management, and public health improvements.
Weiterlesen: Smart cities and hyperspectral imaging: The future of urban sustainability
Proposed across continents, these cities show what our world could look like in 50 years.
Perhaps nothing is more humanistic than the pursuit of futuristic cities. We write about them in utopian—and dystopian—novels, offer glimpses of what they’d look like in movies and TV shows, and now, it seems, we build them too. Though designing for the future could be understood as the most basic requirement for architects and urban planners, in recent years, this goal has been taken to a new level. It seems every few months, firms unveil plans for wholly reimagined metropolitan areas: from floating cities to those in outer space, the offerings are relentless. In these new cities, sustainable infrastructure and smart technology is often a given, and in some cases, the plans even include things that haven’t even been invented (or brought to market) yet—like flying cars or extremely high-speed autonomous transit. Still, it never hurts to dream big, right? With that in mind, AD rounded up six of the most interesting proposals for futuristic cities, some of which are already under construction. Which one are you moving to?
Despite the buzz surrounding smart cities in urban-policy circles, studies are lacking on the evidence for what works, what doesn’t — and who benefits.
It has been at least 50 years since examples of what we now call ‘smart cities’ began to appear. In 1974, officials in Los Angeles, California, used IBM mainframe computers to study poverty in the city. They analysed demographic data on factors such as infant mortality, household incomes and the standard of housing to identify areas in need of assistance. At the time, computers were expensive and more likely to be found in large corporations and fields such as finance and defence. Using them to tackle poverty was an innovative and ‘smart’ thing to do.
Weiterlesen: Why are proponents of ‘smart cities’ neglecting research?