Episode 1 of our Mapping Urban AI Series
How are cities throughout the world interacting with artificial intelligence? What are the opportunities and challenges associated with AI in urban spaces? How can cities design policy to ensure ethical and responsible AI implementation? “Mapping Urban AI,” a webinar series organized by Urban AI, CIDOB, and the Global Observatory of Urban AI (GOUAI), engages with these questions by mapping AI projects spatially and thematically. Each episode hosts representatives from cities around the world to showcase and discuss their projects and policies through the lens of an overarching theme: holistic strategies, health, urban planning, sustainability. The concept for the series draws from both the project “The Atlas of Urban AI,” an interactive online map of AI initiatives that cities throughout the world have undertaken and also from the newly released “Urban AI Guide,” which presents detailed case studies on AI project implementation in local government.
Many cities begin their AI journeys by dabbling in and experimenting with one-off, single-purpose projects. However, as cities develop AI maturity- bringing artificial intelligence into more facets of urban operations in more material ways- the far-reaching impacts of AI and associated technologies necessitate the design of comprehensive, citywide artificial intelligence governance strategies. In the first episode, Paula Boet (Project Manager at Barcelona City Council) and Alex Foard (Executive Director, Research and Collaboration, NYC Office of Technology and Innovation) discuss the ways their respective cities have implemented holistic strategies for urban AI.
In Barcelona, citizen trust and empowerment sit at the core of the city’s overall technology and data governance strategy. Spurred by concerns of surveillance capitalism and a loss of technological sovereignty, Barcelona developed a human-centric Digital Transformation Plan in 2016, which established its commitment to democratic governance of technologies. Since then, additional plans and measures have extended this philosophy to specific aspects of urban technology. With the increased proliferation of emerging technologies, the Barcelona City Council later introduced its “government measure for a municipal algorithms and data strategy for an ethical promotion of AI” (Ethical AI Strategy). The Ethical AI Strategy establishes government-wide ethical principles, oversight and governance mechanisms, and actions united in the aim of safeguarding citizen rights and promoting municipal capacity-building and collaboration around AI. Broadly, the strategy covers a number of high-level guiding principles: technical robustness and security; transparency; responsibility, democratic control & accountability; privacy and data governance; diversity, inclusion & equity; and social and environmental commitment.
However, as Boet points out, the strength of Barcelona’s measure lies in its codification of action items that allow Barcelona to enact its strategy. Notably, the strategy introduces a number of checks and balances in all facets of the AI product lifecycle from design to dismantling. It ensures that purchases and contracts related to AI technologies meet the city’s technological humanism requirements. It also establishes a public register of citizen-facing artificial intelligence algorithms in use by the city, to foster transparency and allows residents to understand where and how technology affects decisions about their lives. Other measures in the strategy center around upskilling public servants and fostering an environment for innovative AI. The strategy strikes a balance between propelling the city along in its AI goals and maintaining the protection and active involvement of its citizens.
While New York City also grounded its 2021 AI Strategy in ethics and citizen rights, it designed its AI governance approach moreso to encompass and account for the vast and diverse population and set of industries that make up New York City. As such, New York’s strategy aims to foster an AI ecosystem across interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral urban stakeholders. Even within the city government, many separate technology offices and agencies had independent projects that dealt with AI. Shortly after the development of the strategy, a shift in city government administration served as a key element that enabled NYC to enact the ideas and goals set forth in the strategy. Under the new administration, a number of city offices and agencies were consolidated into the Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT). This consolidation empowered the previously disparate technology groups within the city to set unified policy, strengthen their capacity for oversight in technological matters, and hire more positions with a focus on AI governance.
As part of the shift, the OIT also began developing an AI Action Plan, in the interest of prioritizing and enacting specific elements of the broader, overarching AI Strategy. The Action Plan focuses on governance through four lenses: encouraging city agencies to consider opportunities for the use of AI to solve internal and external problems, leveraging AI responsibly through the development of guardrails and structured processes, ensuring privacy and security, and fostering engagement with public audiences. The existence of the initial, holistic AI Strategy aided the development of an Action Plan in that it identified the available resources within the city, outlining what could be leveraged in pursuit of the AI strategic goals. The holistic strategy also integrated a source of accountability into the Action Plan, since defining goals and priorities in writing (as the AI Strategy does) allows a government to be better held to them.
In both cases, defining a holistic AI strategy allowed the municipality to set priorities, which unified agencies and departments under common AI-related aims. This kind of holistic planning becomes crucial, especially when ensuring that independent departments, purchases, and projects that interact with artificial intelligence adhere to ethical principles. Further, given the degree to which artificial intelligence cuts across urban sectors, strategic pathways for collaboration and capacity building within a city can help promote innovation. But, as the two cities showed, holistic strategies hold the most value when coupled with specific action items and defined steps toward implementation.
By Sarah Popelka, Contributor and Advisor at Urban AI
