Simon and his colleague Jon Rutherford wrote chapter 9 “The Multiple Temporalities of Self-Healing Infrastructure: From the F-15 Fighter to the Smart Urban Microgrid” in Addie, P., Glass, M.R., &; Nelles, J. edited book “Infrastructural Times: Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds”. Whether waiting for the train or planning the future city, infrastructure orders—and depends on—multiple urban temporalities. This agenda-setting volume disrupts conventional notions of time through a robust examination of the relations between temporality, infrastructure, and urban society. Conceptually rich and empirically detailed, its interdisciplinary dialogue encompasses infrastructural systems including transportation, energy, and water to bridge often-siloed technical, political-economic and lived perspectives. With global coverage of diverse cities and regions from Berlin to Jayapura, this book is an essential provocation to re-evaluate urban theory, politics, and practice and better account for the temporal complexities that shape our infrastructured worlds.
The second publication is a co-authored open access article in Urban Geography. Simon and his colleagues have written an article entitled “Why does urban Artificial Intelligence matter for urban studies? Developing research directions in urban AI research”. New digital technologies and systems are being extensively applied in urban contexts. These technologies and systems include algorithms, robotics, drones, Autonomous Vehicles and autonomous systems that can collectively be labelled as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Critical debates have recognized that these various forms of AI do not merely layer onto existing urban infrastructures, forms of management and practices of everyday life. Instead, they have social and material power: they perform work, anticipate and assess risks and opportunities, are aberrant or glitchy, cause accidents, and make new demands on humans as well as the design of cities. And yet, urban scholars have only recently started to engage with research on urban AI and to begin articulating research directions for urban development beyond the current focus on smart cities. To enhance this engagement, this intervention explores three sets of questions: what is distinctive about this novel way of thinking about and doing cities; what are the emerging mutual interdependencies and interrelations between AI and their urban contexts; and what are the consequent challenges and opportunities for urban governance. In closing, the authors outline research directions shaped around new research questions raised by the emergence of urban AI.