Abstract
Smart cities are a relatively recent phenomenon that has rapidly grown in the last decade due to several political, economic, environmental, and technological factors. Data-driven artificial intelligence is becoming so fundamentally ingrained in these developments that smart cities have been called artificially intelligent cities and autonomous cities. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the physical isolation of people and consequently escalated the pace of human migration to digital and virtual spaces. This paper investigates the use of AI in urban governance as to how AI could help governments learn about urban governance parameters on various subject matters for the governments to develop better governance instruments. To this end, we develop a case study on online learning in Saudi Arabia. We discover ten urban governance parameters using unsupervised machine learning and Twitter data in Arabic. We group these ten governance parameters into four governance macro-parameters namely Strategies and Success Factors, Economic Sustainability, Accountability, and Challenges. The case study shows that the use of data-driven AI can help the government autonomously learn about public feedback and reactions on government matters, the success or failure of government programs, the challenges people are facing in adapting to the government measures, new economic, social, and other opportunities arising out of the situation, and more. The study shows that the use of AI does not have to necessarily replace humans in urban governance, rather governments can use AI, under human supervision, to monitor, learn and improve decision-making processes using continuous feedback from the public and other stakeholders. Challenges are part of life and we believe that the challenges humanity is facing during the COVID-19 pandemic will create new economic, social, and other opportunities nationally and internationally.