Seeing like AI? AI urbanism reconsidered through a critical posthumanist perspective

Abstract

Although critical discourse is expanding, the link between urbanism and artificial intelligence (AI) remains conceptually underexplored. This article critiques the prevailing technocentric and political economy perspectives shaping this emerging discourse, highlighting the theoretical gap they leave and reconsidering them through a critical posthumanist approach, illustrated with examples. This approach offers a departure from both the rational-comprehensive sensibility of AI, which sustains the century-old logic of causation (technocentrism) and the critiques that primarily revolve around the concepts of ‘autonomy’ and top-down ‘legibility’ (political economy) – paradoxically, these divergent discourses commonly grant the technology an undue level of agency and assume the role of ‘seeing like a state’, making other future-making possibilities difficult to imagine. Critical posthumanist thinking provides a space to examine the intersection of humans and technology, opening up ways of investigating how technology may bring about ontological shifts in urban agencies, as well as possibilities for new forms of epistemology. Employing Rosi Braidotti’s conceptual framework of potestas (entrapment) and potentia (empowerment) as a method, the paper thematically explores the potential for emergent, multifaceted power relations, leading to the proposal of a framework that conceptually expands relational scopes in AI urbanism and ethical discussions thereof. By rejecting the notion of AI as disembodied intelligence and embracing a more relational and material understanding, the article seeks to reconsider the ethics of AI urbanism by using the broader lens of agency and its potential impacts on the ways we reinvent and evolve cities.