The Neural City: A next-generation spatio-temporal intelligence paradigm for urban holistic governance
Urban governance dilemmas: Data silos and domain barriers
Modern cities are evolving into complex mega-systems spanning complex domains, including transportation, environment, safety, and economy. This complexity calls for an up-to-date urban governance (UG) paradigm that integrates multi-domain information and requirements, comprehensively grasping the urban status by determining when, where, what, and what change; reasoning why; and raising what reaction ("6W"), thus delivering the right data to the right person at the right time in the right place ("4R"). The "6W+4R" paradigm enables dynamic, autonomous, and comprehensive decision-making to enhance resilience, sustainability, and livability. Yet, two bottlenecks remain.
The first is data silos. Urban spatio-temporal data (e.g., images, point clouds, trajectories, and videos) are highly heterogeneous across sources, perspectives, and formats. Without a unified framework for organization and manipulation, cross-source integration and collaborative analysis are hampered, creating silos that block holistic urban perception and understanding.
The second is domain barriers. Governance spans domains such as transportation, energy, environment, and housing, each with distinct knowledge, decision-making logic, and tools. Disparate terminology, incompatible methods, and fragmented perspectives hinder cross-domain information exchange and collaboration, leading to isolated, locally optimal decisions that undermine globally optimal city-wide governance.
Neural City: A next-generation UG paradigm
In this commentary, we outline a potential paradigm for holistic UG, termed the Neural City (Figure 1). Neural City is a differentiable formulation encoding heterogeneous spatio-temporal data (e.g., images, point clouds, maps, videos, and sensors) and cross-domain knowledge (e.g., physical laws, industrial standards, and social regulations), enabling gradient-based end-to-end optimization for urban perception, analysis, simulation, and policy making.
