“We sometimes focus a lot on the disruptiveness of technologies, and we don’t work enough on the people,” Carlos Alvarado Quesada, former president of Costa Rica, and a professor at the Fletcher School of Law at Tufts University, said Sunday during a panel at the inaugural gathering of CoMotion GLOBAL in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which brought together hundreds of public- and private-sector technology and transportation officials from around the world.
“We’ve seen an agenda of things we want. We want safer transportation, quicker, better for people. So that’s the intention. That’s the aim,” Quesada said, reiterating the need for education around the new technologies that can enable some of those quality-of-life advancements.
From traffic management to internal office operations to detecting wildfires, cities and regional governments are turning to AI tools to not only gather and analyze data but make decisions as well. The speed and possibility of the change is starting new conversations around digital governance, and even the role of the “sandbox.”
Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab, made a similar call by advocating for tools like digital twins as a way to test and model technologies before they are widely scaled.
“If you turn the city into a living lab, then people can experience firsthand,” Ratti said during the panel. “It’s experiential learning.”
This dovetails with the “tactical urbanism” philosophy Shin-pei Tsay, chief research and data officer in Boston, shared during a panel discussion at the CoMotion LA conference just a few weeks earlier.
Using the smaller sandbox approach allows technology to move forward in a deliberative process, she said.
Tactical urbanism “is meant to be a steppingstone to get bigger projects done, more permanently. And was meant to be a demonstration that led to something more,” Tsay said, indicating those sandboxes are a way for Boston to put boundaries around the experiments and create “limited access to maybe emerging technologies, or within a district.”
As cities evolve with the adoption of AI technologies, these digital governance and policy approaches will become more essential, experts said.
“We need to find the right balance. And that’s the local adaptation. Every society need to find its balance in order to implement,” Quesada said. “Some might like the autonomous vehicle walking around. Other people may not. It depends.”
Autonomous technologies, AI and next-gen smart city applications are creating an urban future that needs thoughtful deliberation as well as risk-taking, to improve the life experiences for city dwellers today and in the future, said John Rossant, founder and CEO of CoMotion, and founder and chairman of the NewCities Foundation.
CoMotion Global brought together more than 2,000 “leaders, innovators, public sector visionaries and investors” from 91 countries, Rossant said, noting this included more than 100 city mayors. “We’re laying the groundworks for a brave new urban era, in which people and goods move efficiently, sustainably, and seamlessly.”
As U.S. priorities shift, CoMotion and other urbanist advocates could continue to look beyond the borders of America for partnerships and collaboration where, in the words of Rossant, “commute times shrink, where pollution disappears, where energy consumption really declines, and horrific traffic fatalities become largely a thing of the past.”
“We must encourage East and West to work together for a better urban future,” Rossant said. “This is not a distant dream. It is the mission we embark on today.”
