Future Cities: Where Biology Meets Computing

Main points — free preview

• Cities are already biological systems — urban microbiomes, street trees, wastewater ecosystems, and food supply chains — but most urban planning treats biology as landscaping, not infrastructure.
• Bio-based building materials, environmental biosensors, and edge AI are converging to create 'living infrastructure' concepts — some demonstrated in pilots, many still speculative in scale.
• Equity and governance matter as much as technology: who benefits from smart-city biology, who bears the monitoring costs, and who controls the data are unresolved questions in most deployments.