Project Description
Abstract
Today’s cities are facing increasingly complex challenges. The growing uncertainty and
complexity—caused by the unremitted differentiation of social, environmental, and
technological orders—call for novel ways of conceptualizing urban reality. Although
technology-oriented solutions shape the most efficient strategies to manage complexity
in contemporary cities, ensuring an effective transition towards Quantum City paradigm
can grant considerable advantages for city administrators facing looming urban
challenges. In this article, we introduce Quantum City metaphor—grounded in
fundamental notions of quantum mechanics—as a new conceptual lens for
investigating urban complexity. We then build upon the metaphor, theorizing a set of
assumptions grounded in three fundamental concepts of quantum theory: relativity,
uncertainty, and duality/parallelism. Finally, we propose an empirical conceptualization
of Quantum Cities based on the concrete adoption of quantum technologies to deal
with urban complexity. This is achieved through systematic literature review of
scholarly records on quantum technologies in context of social sciences, emphasizing
related urban problematics and challenges. Principal component analysis and
agglomerative hierarchical clustering reveal two types of quantum technologies most
useful for city managers: quantum communication and quantum computing.
Accordingly, we perform a qualitative thematic synthesis of related scholarly records,
emphasizing the negative and positive aspects of both types of urban quantum
technologies.
