What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at the Biennial to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies – and Artificial Intelligence in particular – might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, the Politecnico di Torino and SCUT.
If the city can see, we can deceive it—spoofing its sensors, denying its services, even misleading its self-driving technologies. Armed with digital exploits, zero-day threats, pranks, and glitches, we might say that every vision of the smart city implies the attacks that could bring that city to its knees. The cyber-weapon is the flipside of the near-future city, the id of the smart metropolis.
An April 2019 white paper released by the Washington DC-based New America Foundation described “an explosion of cyber-physical systems” taking over the urban landscape. These systems operate “in sectors from transportation, to water systems, to lighting, to parking, in which computers do not merely store and manipulate data, but collect data through sensors and manipulate the physical world through actuators of various types.”
