The research project aims at studying the impact of AI applications in the urban context, in relation to the social implications and the technological developments. The research is conducted in a multidisciplinary setting, harnessing the collaboration between the Nexa Center for Internet and Society and the Future Urban Legacy Lab (which involves seven different engineering departments).
The first goal of the project is the creation of a digital infrastructure for the Digital Open Urban Twin, i.e. a platform - open in terms of licenses of the data and adherence to open standards - that allows the creation of layers of data “above” the physical city, each one on a specific focus and with potentially different - but coherent - level of details. The result is a “digital twin” of the city, which gives to researchers and policy makers the possibility to spatially correlate and visualize, beyond the more consolidated uses of 3D city models and 3DGIS, how urban phenomena/problems are distributed across different areas of the city and how they are connected each other at multiple scales. An exemplary but not exhaustive list of urban dimensions of interest are: pollution, arrests, poverty, education, energy consumption, traffic flows, commercial activities.

The second operational goal of the project concerns Cities & Inequalities and it is twofold: 1) spatialize current marginalities e inequalities in a sample of cities; 2) investigate on the role of artificial intelligence techniques and in general digital technologies in perpetuating, amplifying or reducing such inequalities.