On a humid evening in Bengaluru, a stretch of road clears itself of traffic without a single policeman intervening. Sensors beneath the ground detect congestion forming a kilometre away and reroute vehicles before the jam materialises. In Surat, a water grid predicts leaks hours before a drop is lost. These are not glimpses of a distant future; they are signs of how Indian cities are beginning to evolve into thinking systems.
Before the end of this century, the most powerful and complex form of intelligence on Earth may not be biological or robotic. It will not walk or breathe. It will be something larger and more diffuse: our cities. What were once physical spaces for human activity are becoming living networks that sense, learn and act. Driven by data, algorithms, and sensors, cities are starting to function like giant neural systems. They will not simply respond to instructions — they will anticipate needs, adapt autonomously and influence decisions. They could prevent traffic jams before they occur, balance energy uses dynamically, detect disease outbreaks in advance and even help shape public policy in real time.
This transformation is not merely technological. It is political, economic, and civilisational.
The decisions taken today will determine what these new urban intelligences become — whether they enhance human freedom or constrain it, whether they distribute opportunity or entrench inequality, whether they strengthen democracy or enable authoritarian control.
From “Smart” to “Thinking” Cities:
The shift from basic digital infrastructure to real intelligence has already begun. In Hangzhou, China, an AI system called City Brain cut traffic jams by predicting where congestion was about to happen and changing traffic signals automatically. The result was dramatic — the city fell from being the fifth most congested in China to fifty — seventh.
In Singapore, a project called “Virtual Singapore” has created a complete digital version of the city that helps planners test policies for energy, disaster response and construction before they are rolled out. Even Quayside in Toronto — a bold but cancelled experiment — showed what a future city could look like if machine learning guided housing, transport and utilities from the ground up.
Two decades ago, a “smart city” meant a city that could react to data — adjusting traffic lights or tracking water leaks. What is coming now is much deeper. A “thinking city” can learn from data and act on its own. Its sensors and processors work like a nervous system.
The movement of water, power and vehicles follows the same physical laws that govern heat and energy. Its constant feedback and adaptation resemble the way living brains respond to their environment. As a physicist, I see this not as a metaphor but as a real turning point: cities are changing from passive places we live in into active systems that evolve and think alongside us.
India’s Smart Cities Mission, launched in 2015, was an important first step — bringing digital tools into public services and Governance. But the next stage will be more demanding. Building “thinking” cities will require artificial intelligence to be woven into every layer of infrastructure, planning and policymaking, along with strong systems to guide and oversee how this intelligence is used.
The Physical Foundations of Urban Intelligence:
Intelligence is always rooted in the physical world — in energy, water, computing power and human talent. The new intelligence of cities is no different. A single hyperscale data centre, the “brain” of an AI city, can use over 100 megawatts of electricity — as much as a mid-sized town — and millions of litres of water each day for cooling.
The International Energy Agency warns that global data centres could consume more than 945 terawatt-hours of power annually by 2030, nearly double today’s levels, driven largely by AI. In the United States, AI-focused data capacity is expected to grow thirtyfold by 2035.
India is part of this surge. Its data centre capacity is projected to rise from about 870 MW in 2023 to over 1,300 MW by 2027, with major hubs in Hyderabad, Chennai and Navi Mumbai. But these facilities will also strain electricity, water and land. Some already consume up to 19 million litres of water a day. If cities ignore these limits, they risk creating new crises even as they try to solve old ones.
Human capital is just as vital. Even the most advanced AI systems depend on skilled people to design, Govern and question them. By 2027, global demand for AI professionals will far exceed supply.
India’s demographic advantage will mean little without heavy investment in education, research, and innovation ecosystems. Without this, nations could become dependent on foreign technology — a new form of digital dependence that weakens sovereignty.
Governing Cities That Think:
The political stakes are immense. Thinking cities will generate unprecedented volumes of data on how people move, work, shop and live.
This data can enable more efficient services, targeted welfare delivery, and early detection of disease. It can also enable pervasive surveillance, algorithmic discrimination and political manipulation. The same systems that optimise bus routes can be used to monitor dissent.
Regulation cannot be an afterthought. Europe’s AI Act, which took effect in August 2024, imposes strict requirements on high-risk systems, including transparency, data quality, human oversight, and post-deployment monitoring. India is also moving toward comprehensive AI and data governance frameworks. But national regulation is only one layer. Cities — where algorithmic decisions will most directly affect lives — must build governance mechanisms of their own.
This means establishing algorithm audit boards with real enforcement powers, creating citizen assemblies to decide how public data is used, and mandating transparency and explainability for municipal AI systems. Oversight must be embedded into the architecture of urban intelligence from the outset, not added after harms occur.
Inclusion as Core Architecture:
Fairness cannot be an afterthought either. AI systems are only as representative as the data they learn from. If entire populations are invisible to the data — because they lack digital IDs, smartphones, or fixed addresses — they risk exclusion from the city’s intelligence altogether.
This is not hypothetical. Predictive policing tools in the United States have disproportionately targeted minority communities. In the Netherlands, a biased welfare algorithm wrongly penalised thousands of families, triggering a political crisis so severe that it brought down the government. If future urban systems are trained only on data from the connected and privileged, they will encode inequality into the city’s neural core.
Designing inclusive urban intelligence requires representative datasets, rigorous bias testing, and meaningful participation from affected communities. India’s digital public infrastructure — from Aadhaar to UPI — demonstrates how scale and inclusion can be balanced, but only if they are pursued deliberately. The ultimate measure of a thinking city is not the speed of its computation but the breadth of its inclusion.
Cities as Strategic Assets:
This transformation is not just technological or ethical. It is geopolitical. Cities are becoming strategic assets in the global contest for technological leadership. Shenzhen’s evolution into the world’s hardware capital transformed China’s economy. Be’er Sheva’s cybersecurity ecosystem reshaped Israel’s technological profile. Data centre capacity is expected to triple globally by 2030, yet it is consolidating in a small number of metropolitan hubs where power, fibre, and land converge. Over half of the world’s top 100 data centre locations already face high climate risk — a figure projected to rise to 68% by 2040, with water scarcity among the most serious threats.
For nations and cities that aspire to leadership, passivity is not an option. Attracting foreign investment is insufficient. Countries must insist on local research and development, demand ethical and environmental safeguards, and build governance frameworks grounded in democratic principles. Without this, cities risk becoming marketplaces for foreign ambitions rather than engines of national strategy. India’s future influence in global affairs may depend as much on whether Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Delhi become intelligent, adaptive cities as on traditional markers of power such as satellites or nuclear reactors.
A Civilisational Choice:
Humanity has always built cities in its own image. For the first time, cities are beginning to build minds of their own. They will shape how societies live, govern, innovate, and wage conflict. They could become humanity’s most powerful allies — or its most formidable competitors. The difference will not lie in their intelligence but in our wisdom.
The next great intelligence on this planet is emerging. It will not wear a face or speak a language. It will think about traffic flows, water currents, energy pulses, and social patterns. And as it awakens — in Mumbai and Bengaluru as surely as in Hangzhou or Toronto — the decisive question will not be how it thinks, but for whom. Our answer will determine whether the cities we build serve humanity’s highest ideals — or whether humanity becomes subordinate to the systems it has created.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Nishant Sahdev
Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: The Pioneer, 20.10.2025
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
