Jun Zhang and colleagues have published a new article in Urban Geography arguing that urban AI should not be understood as a single, inevitable next stage of the smart city. Instead, it shows that AI urbanism is a contested political and discursive formation—a set of truth-claims about what AI is, what it can do, and why it should govern.
Using a Foucauldian discourse analysis, the paper asks how ideas such as autonomy become credible and actionable in urban governance, and how they reshape who gets to decide, what counts as rational policy, and whose futures are made governable in AI's name. In this way, the paper shifts focus away from technical capability alone and toward the politics of how AI is made legitimate.
A major contribution of the paper is to show that AI urbanism does not arrive on a blank slate. It grows out of what the authors call the "smartmentality" of the smart city, but it also fragments into distinct urban AI formations rather than following one universal model.
Through a comparative analysis of Shenzhen, Boston, and Barcelona, the paper identifies three contrasting formations: Shenzhen's predictive orchestration, Boston's careful and modest counter-conduct, and Barcelona's procedurally bounded conditionality. These are not treated as local variations of the same template, but as divergent projects that organize authority, accountability, participation, and temporality in different ways.
The paper's distinctive theoretical intervention is therefore to pluralize "AI urbanism" into "AI urbanismS." It introduces an abductively developed six-facet analytical framework that helps scholars examine how AI's truth-claims are assembled, authorized, and contested across different urban settings. In doing so, the paper not only extends Foucauldian debates on regimes of truth and governmentality into the study of urban AI, but also provincializes dominant narratives of the "autonomous city." Its broader message is that there is nothing inevitable about current AI futures in cities; rather, they are historically situated, politically constructed, and therefore open to challenge, reworking, and alternative imaginaries.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Gaby Clark & Andrew Zinin
Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: phys.org, 25.03.2026
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