From smart to intelligent cities: learning for sustainability

Smart city development is a strategy to address problems caused by rapid urbanization and socio-economic challenges. While the notion of a ‘smart’ city is ubiquitous, this paper argues that what is needed is not a city where managerial responsibilities have been handed over to ICT, but rather to conceptualise the city as an ecosystem. This perspective posits the city as a complex adaptive system, a cognitive city, which adaptively learns via urban planners and managers. With reference to the Covid-19 pandemic and the UK response, we recognise various constraints to human judgement and decision making under complex conditions, and advocate the contribution of in silico simulations and controlled experiments to test future threats and response scenarios. These facilitate identifying unsustainable future trajectories and the development of alternative strategic opportunities to foster building systemic resilience in anticipating future shocks, and that doing so is an ethical necessity to conserve the viability of future city systems.