Perspective for Urban Informatics
Written by Shi Wenzhong, Michael Goodchild, Michael Batty, Li Qingquan, Liu Xintao, Zhang An’shu Translated by Huang Yuyan, Liu Chao
Abstract：
The specialization of different urban sectors, theories, and technologies and their confluence in city development have led to a greatly accelerated
growth in urban informatics, the transdisciplinary field for understanding and developing the city through new information technologies. While this young and
highly promising field has attracted multiple reviews of its advances and outlook for its future, it would be instructive to probe further into the research initiatives
of this rapidly evolving field, to provide reference to the development of not only urban informatics, but moreover the future of cities as a whole. This paper
thus presents a collection of research initiatives for urban informatics, based on the reviews of the state of the art in this field. The initiatives cover three levels,
namely the future of urban science; core enabling technologies including geospatial artificial intelligence, high-definition mapping, quantum computing, artificial
intelligence and the internet of things (AIoT), digital twins, explainable artificial intelligence, distributed machine learning, privacy-preserving deep learning,
and applications in urban design and planning, transport, location-based services, and the metaverse, together with a discussion of algorithmic and data-driven
approaches. The paper concludes with hopes for the future development of urban informatics and focusses on the balance between our ever-increasing reliance
on technology and important societal concerns.