Unpacking the ‘15-Minute City’ via 6G, IoT, and Digital Twins: Towards a New Narrative for Increasing Urban Efficiency, Resilience, and Sustainability

Allam, Zaheer; Bibri, Simon Elias; Jones, David; Chabaud, Didier; Moreno, Carlos

doi:10.3390/s22041369

Cited by 66 publications

(33 citation statements)

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“…Their activities include city and data mapping, aiding micro recalibrations in their policy determinations that help to understand and address existing and emerging issues in cities, especially with new planning models. These include the smart city concept (e.g., [20]), the '15-min city' concept [21], the 'data-driven sustainable smart city' concept [14], and others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures

et al. 2022

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Data infrastructures, economic processes, and governance models of digital platforms are increasingly pervading urban sectors and spheres of urban life. This phenomenon is known as platformization, which has in turn given rise to the phenomena of platform society, where platforms have permeated the core of urban societies. A recent manifestation of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform project launched by Meta (formerly Facebook) as a globally operating platform company. The Metaverse represents an idea of a hypothetical “parallel virtual world” that incarnate ways of living and working in virtual cities as an alternative to smart cities of the future. Indeed, with emerging innovative technologies—such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, the IoT, and Digital Twins—providing rich datasets and advanced computational understandings of human behavior, the Metaverse has the potential to redefine city designing activities and service provisioning towards increasing urban efficiencies, accountabilities, and quality performance. However, there still remain ethical, human, social, and cultural concerns as to the Metaverse’s influence upon the quality of human social interactions and its prospective scope in reconstructing the quality of urban life. This paper undertakes an upper-level literature review of the area of the Metaverse from a broader perspective. Further, it maps the emerging products and services of the Metaverse, and explores their potential contributions to smart cities with respect to their virtual incarnation, with a particular focus on the environmental, economic, and social goals of sustainability. This study may help urban policy makers to better understand the opportunities and implications of the Metaverse upon tech-mediated practices and applied urban agendas, as well as assess the positives and negatives of this techno-urban vision. This paper also offers thoughts regarding the argument that the Metaverse has disruptive and substantive effects on forms of reconstructing reality in an increasingly platformized urban society. This will hopefully stimulate prospective research and further critical perspectives on the topic.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures

et al. 2022

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“…Especially, it is expected that the Metaverse’s requirements will exceed 5G’s available bandwidth (Braud et al, 2020 ). However, these high-speed network technologies are associated with serious risks to human health (e.g., Allam et al 2022b ). They may disfigure the city landscape to stave off serious health damages by high frequency microwave radiations.…”

Section: The Ethical Implications Of the Metaverse In Post-pandemic U...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities: the ethics of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization of urban society

Bibri

Allam

2022

Comput.Urban Sci.

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Recent advances in computing and immersive technologies have provided Meta (formerly Facebook) with the opportunity to leapfrog or expedite its way of thinking and devising a global computing platform called the “Metaverse”. This hypothetical 3D network of virtual spaces is increasingly shaping alternatives to the imaginaries of data-driven smart cities, as it represents ways of living in virtually inhabitable cities. At the heart of the Metaverse is a computational understanding of human users’ cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior that reduces the experience of everyday life to logic and calculative rules and procedures. This implies that human users become more knowable and manageable and their behavior more predictable and controllable, thereby serving as passive data points feeding the AI and analytics system that they have no interchange with or influence on. This paper examines the forms, practices, and ethics of the Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities, paying particular attention to: privacy, surveillance capitalism, dataveillance, geosurveillance, human health and wellness, and collective and cognitive echo-chambers. Achieving this aim will provide the answer to the main research question driving this study: What ethical implications will the Metaverse have on the experience of everyday life in post-pandemic urban society? In terms of methodology, this paper deploys a thorough review of the current status of the Metaverse, urban informatics, urban science, and data-driven smart cities literature, as well as trends, research, and developments. We argue that the Metaverse will do more harm than good to human users due to the massive misuse of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization underlying the associated global architecture of computer mediation. It follows that the Metaverse needs to be re-cast in ways that re-orientate in how users are conceived; recognize their human characteristics; and take into account the moral values and principles designed to realize the benefits of socially disruptive technologies while mitigating their pernicious effects. This paper contributes to the academic debates in the emerging field of data-driven smart urbanism by highlighting the ethical implications posed by the Metaverse as speculative fiction that illustrates the concerns raised by the pervasive and massive use of advanced technologies in data-driven smart cities. In doing so, it seeks to aid policy-makers in better understanding the pitfalls of the Metaverse and their repercussions upon the wellbeing of human users and the core values of urban society. It also stimulates prospective research and further critical perspectives on this timely topic.

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“…Combined with the Internet of Things, it can increase the efficient design of a smart city. This can be achieved by reinforcing its financial indicators, improving its management resources, and reducing the environmental impact of each citizen [32][33][34][35]…”

Section: Smart Citiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Twins in the Automotive Industry: The Road toward Physical-Digital Convergence

Piromalis

Kantaros

2022

ASI

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A newly introduced term in the field of simulating an artificial or physical system is that of the “Digital Twin” concept method. It employs a digital representation and modeling method, capable of expanding and improving the life cycle of complex items, systems, and processes. Nowadays, digital twin technology has become a key research field worldwide. In this context, it is applied and utilized in various fields. One such field is the automotive industry, a technological field that has great implications in users’ everyday life. Digital twin technology not only has great contributions from the initial stages of design until the final construction stages of vehicles, but also during its use, drawing useful information from its daily functions and making the driving experience more enjoyable, comfortable, and safe. It is worth noting that the vehicles that can greatly benefit from the use of digital twins are electric vehicles, which has tended to acquire greater shares in the last decade.

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Unpacking the ‘15-Minute City’ via 6G, IoT, and Digital Twins: Towards a New Narrative for Increasing Urban Efficiency, Resilience, and Sustainability

Cited by 66 publications

References 50 publications

The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures

The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures

The Metaverse as a virtual form of data-driven smart cities: the ethics of the hyper-connectivity, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization of urban society

Digital Twins in the Automotive Industry: The Road toward Physical-Digital Convergence

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