Smart Cities with AI - Junfeng Jiao

Smart Cities with AI examines how the value of artificial intelligence in cities is determined by who deploys it, under what governance, and with what regard for consequences beyond the immediate problem it addresses. It treats the smart city as an ongoing project that succeeds or fails on the institutions and communities AI serves, not on the technology alone.

Across fifteen chapters by specialists in planning, engineering, public health, computer science, and law, the volume moves from foundations – AI as a family of methods, and the city as a complex system – through applications in mobility, housing, urban design, public health, healthcare, infrastructure, disaster resilience, and education, to the ethical, privacy, and accessibility questions that decide whether these systems serve cities fairly. A consistent analytical thread runs throughout: a focus on second-order consequences, tracing how an intervention optimized for one goal ripples into domains it never named, and on recurring tensions such as efficiency versus equity, automation versus oversight, and data utility versus privacy. Concrete cases, including computer vision for neighborhood health and AI-driven flood response, ground each argument in practice.

Written for researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in urban planning, urban informatics, public policy, and allied fields, the book offers both an accessible entry point to urban AI and a critical, cross-sector framework for those who design, govern, and study it.